Loops

Loops in Python

If you want to repeat a task multiple times, Python has a way to do that easily using loops. There are two types of basic loops in python: for loops and while loops.

For loops

For loops iterate over a sequence. Let’s say you wanted to repeat a simple task 5 times. Here is how you would do it.

The following for loop iterates through each of the numbers in the list [1,2,3,4,5], and assigns the value x to it. Then, it executes the code within the for loop.

What if you wanted to repeat a task 10 times instead? 100 times? 1000 times??

It would be difficult to write a list with 1000 numbers [1,2,3,4,5,6,……….,998,999,1000]. There is a function that can create this list for you.

Here’s an example of how to create the list using the range function:

The below code creates a list starting at 1 and ending at 10. Try replacing the list [1,2,3,4,5] in the above example with this range function!

range(1,11)

The list in the for loop doesn’t just have to be numbers, it can be anything! Here is another example of what you can do with it:

While loops

While loops are similar to for loops, but instead of iterating over a sequence, they repeat for as long as a certain condition is met. For example, let’s create a while loop that repeates 5 times.

As you can see, all of the code below the while loop gets executed as long as the variable count is less than 5.

Be careful! Make sure that the condition becomes False at some point, or the loop will continue infinitely.