Sometimes while you are executing a loop, you might like to skip something, at those times you can use a key word called continue. Let’s say that I don’t want 6 getting printed when I write a program to print 1 to 10, I can write a program like this:

i = 0

while i < 10

    i += 1

    if i == 6
        continue
    end

    println(i)
end

Output:

1
2
3
4
5
7
8
9
10

Look at these lines of code in the above example:

if i == 6
    continue
end

It tells Julia to continue to next iteration if i equals 6, so the statement that comes after it, that is in this case println(i) won’t get executes when i is 6, and it will go to the next iteration and i will become 7 and the loop will go on normally. So seeing this why can’t you write a program that prints only even numbers or odd numbers below a given value in the number line?

continue tells Julia to skip operation and go on to next iteration, break tells it to break out of the loop entirely. Type the program below in your notebook and execute it:

i = 1

while i <= 10

    println(i)

    if i == 6
        break
    end

    i += 1
end

Output:

1
2
3
4
5
6

Here when i is 6, in these lines:

if i == 6
    break
end

when i==6 becomes true, and break will get executed, and the program breaks out of the loop. Hence only 1 to 6 gets printed and the loop breaks.

A very similar implementation of the above programs is given below using for loop for continue:

for i in 1:10

    if i == 6
        continue
    end

    println(i)
end

Output:

1
2
3
4
5
7
8
9
10

and this one is for break:

for i in 1:10
    println(i)

    if i == 6
        break
    end
end

Output:

1
2
3
4
5
6

The notebook for this blog can be found here https://gitlab.com/data-science-with-julia/code/-/blob/master/breaks_and_continues.ipynb.