When working with loops, you sometimes need to control how and when the loop continues or ends. Two important statements for this purpose are break and continue. The break statement is used to immediately exit a loop, regardless of whether the loop's original condition has been met. This is useful when you want to stop the loop as soon as a certain condition occurs. The continue statement, on the other hand, skips the remaining code in the current iteration and jumps straight to the next iteration of the loop. This helps you avoid executing specific code for certain values or situations within the loop.

Using break as shown above allows you to exit the loop as soon as a specific condition is met, such as finding a certain value or reaching a threshold. In contrast, the continue statement is useful when you want to skip over certain iterations but keep the loop running for the remaining values. For example, you might want to process only odd numbers or skip invalid inputs within a loop.

In real-world programming, you might use break to stop searching through a list once you have found what you need, such as finding a user's record in a database or detecting a specific error condition. The continue statement is helpful for filtering out unwanted data, such as skipping blank lines when processing a file or ignoring invalid user input during data validation. Both statements give you more precise control over how your loops behave, making your code more efficient and easier to understand.