We often want to use a for loop to search through a list for some value:

items_on_sale = ["blue_shirt", "striped_socks", "knit_dress", "red_headband", "dinosaur_onesie"]

# we want to check if the item with ID "knit_dress" is on sale:
for item in items_on_sale:
  if item == "knit_dress":
    print("Knit Dress is on sale!")

This code goes through each item in items_on_sale and checks for a match. After we find that "knit_dress" is in the list items_on_sale, we don’t need to go through the rest of the items_on_sale list. Since it’s only 5 elements long, iterating through the entire list is not a big deal in this case. But what if items_on_sale had 1000 items after "knit_dress"? What if it had 100,000 items after "knit_dress"?

You can stop a for loop from inside the loop by using break. When the program hits a break statement, control returns to the code outside of the for loop. For example:

items_on_sale = ["blue_shirt", "striped_socks", "knit_dress", "red_headband", "dinosaur_onesie"]

print("Checking the sale list!")
for item in items_on_sale:
  print(item)
  if item == "knit_dress":
    break
print("End of search!")

This would produce the output:

Checking the sale list!
blue_shirt
striped_socks
knit_dress
End of search!

We didn’t need to check "red_headband" or "dinosaur_onesie" at all!