Example use of "continue" statement in Python?

Question

Here's a simple example:

for letter in 'Django':    
    if letter == 'D':
        continue
    print("Current Letter: " + letter)

Output will be:

Current Letter: j
Current Letter: a
Current Letter: n
Current Letter: g
Current Letter: o

It continues to the next iteration of the loop.

I like to use continue in loops where there are a lot of contitions to be fulfilled before you get "down to business". So instead of code like this:

for x, y in zip(a, b):
    if x > y:
        z = calculate_z(x, y)
        if y - z < x:
            y = min(y, z)
            if x ** 2 - y ** 2 > 0:
                lots()
                of()
                code()
                here()

I get code like this:

for x, y in zip(a, b):
    if x <= y:
        continue
    z = calculate_z(x, y)
    if y - z >= x:
        continue
    y = min(y, z)
    if x ** 2 - y ** 2 <= 0:
        continue
    lots()
    of()
    code()
    here()

By doing it this way I avoid very deeply nested code. Also, it is easy to optimize the loop by eliminating the most frequently occurring cases first, so that I only have to deal with the infrequent but important cases (e.g. divisor is 0) when there is no other showstopper.

Usually the situation where continue is necessary/useful, is when you want to skip the remaining code in the loop and continue iteration.

I don't really believe it's necessary, since you can always use if statements to provide the same logic, but it might be useful to increase readability of code.

import random  

for i in range(20):  
    x = random.randint(-5,5)  
    if x == 0: continue  
    print 1/x  

continue is an extremely important control statement. The above code indicates a typical application, where the result of a division by zero can be avoided. I use it often when I need to store the output from programs, but dont want to store the output if the program has crashed. Note, to test the above example, replace the last statement with print 1/float(x), or you'll get zeros whenever there's a fraction, since randint returns an integer. I omitted it for clarity.

Some people have commented about readability, saying "Oh it doesn't help readability that much, who cares?"

Suppose you need a check before the main code:

if precondition_fails(message): continue

''' main code here '''

Note you can do this after the main code was written without changing that code in anyway. If you diff the code, only the added line with "continue" will be highlighted since there are no spacing changes to the main code.

Imagine if you have to do a breakfix of production code, which turns out to simply be adding a line with continue. It's easy to see that's the only change when you review the code. If you start wrapping the main code in if/else, diff will highlight the newly indented code, unless you ignore spacing changes, which is dangerous particularly in Python. I think unless you've been in the situation where you have to roll out code on short notice, you might not fully appreciate this.

def filter_out_colors(elements):
  colors = ['red', 'green']
  result = []
  for element in elements:
    if element in colors:
       continue # skip the element
    # You can do whatever here
    result.append(element)
  return result

  >>> filter_out_colors(['lemon', 'orange', 'red', 'pear'])
  ['lemon', 'orange', 'pear']