Consider an example where we have a basket of fruits: apple, banana, orange, peach, and mango. We want to iterate over all the items in the basket and print the names of the fruits one at a time. This can be accomplished using print() statement in the body of our for loop.

As you can see from the output, every time the body of the loop is executed, it prints the fruit name and comes back to the basket for the next item. When there are no more fruits in the basket, the for loop ends.

Often, we want to access item in the sequence by its index. For loops present us with a great opportunity to count items, access each item separately, or determine if an item exists in the sequence. Consider the following example, where we still have our basket of fruits, but now we want to count the fruits and print their indexes.

Please remember that there are many ways to perform the same action in Python. The built-in Python method enumerate() is used here for demonstration.

As you can see from the output, the for loop provided us with wide range of information about the basket and its items. We know the fruit’s name, index, and count, and now are ready to implement additional statements to control the for loop.

A good habit is to use control statements, break or continue, exit, or skip some parts of the for loop.

Break statement is placed inside the for loop to break out the loop prematurely. After the break statement, no codes are executed inside the loop.

In our example, we use the break statement to exit the for loop as soon as we find peach.

Continue statement is placed inside the for loop to shortcut the loop skipping over an item and proceeding to the next one in the sequence.

In our example, we can use the continue statement to skip over one item, banana, and proceed with the iteration over the rest of the fruit in the basket.