You can use loops in Python to execute code logic repeatedly until a specified condition is met.

Python provides some built-in control statements that let you change the behavior of a loop. Some of these control statements include continue, break, pass, and else.

In this article, you'll learn how to terminate the current loop or a switch statement using the break statement.

How to Use the break Statement in a Python for Loop

Consider the Python list below:

usernames = ["Jade", "John", "Jane", "Doe"]

You can use a for loop to iterate through and print the elements of the usernames list:

usernames = ["Jade", "John", "Jane", "Doe"]

for i in usernames:
    print(i)
# Jade
# John
# Jane
# Doe

But what if you want to stop the loop when a particular username is found? You can do this using the break statement.

Here's an example:

usernames = ["Jade", "John", "Jane", "Doe"]

for i in usernames:
    print(i)
    if i == "John":
        break
# Jade
# John

In the code above, we created an if statement that checks whether the current value of i is "John": if i == "John".

In the body of the if statement, we used the break statement. So the loop will stop when it finds an element in the list with the value of "John".

So instead of printing the whole list ("Jade", "John", "Jane", "Doe"), "Jade" and "John" were printed because the loop stopped immediately after it found "John".

How to Use the break Statement in a Python while Loop

You can terminate a while loop using the break statement:

usernames = ["Jade", "John", "Jane", "Doe"]

i = 0
while i < len(usernames):
    print(usernames[i])
    if usernames[i] == "John":
        break
    i += 1

Just like we did in the for loop example, we created a usernames list with four elements: ["Jade", "John", "Jane", "Doe"].

Using an if statement in the while loop, we checked when the current loop was at the index with a value "John". When that happens, the loop is terminated.

Once again, "Jade" and "John" were printed because the loop stops when "John" is found.

Conclusion

In this article, you learned to use the break statement in Python. You can use it to terminate the current loop when a condition is met.

From the above examples, you learned how to use the break statement to terminate for and while loops in Python.

Happy coding!