Why is loop not stopping using 'continue'?

Question

So I am new at programming and I was writing some practice code (Python 3.6):

while True:
 print('Hello Steve, what is the password?')
 password = input()
 if password != '1234':
 continue
 print('Access granted')

The problem i'm having is that even though I am typing the correct password, the loop continues.Can you help me figure out what I did wrong?

• Stack: use break instead of continue
• Vince W.: Or to expand on that, the while True loop can only be exited with a break statement
• Bart Friederichs: What exactly do you want to happen? The code is not very clear about that.

Answer 1

continue will skip the rest of the current round in the loop, and then the loop will start over:

>>> i = 0
>>> while i < 5:
... i += 1
... if i == 3:
... continue
... print(i)
...
1
2
4
5
>>>

What you're looking for is the break keyword, which will exit the loop completely:

>>> i = 0
>>> while i < 5:
... i += 1
... if i == 3:
... break
... print(i)
...
1
2
>>>

However, notice that break will jump out of the loop completely, and your print('Access granted') is after that. So what you want is something like this:

while True:
 print('Hello Steve, what is the password?')
 password = input()
 if password == '1234':
 print('Access granted')
 break

Or use the while loop's condition, although this requires repeating the password = ...:

password = input('Hello Steve, what is the password?\n')
while password != '1234':
 password = input('Hello Steve, what is the password?\n')
print('Access granted')

• sntovas: Thank you for your detailed response!
• Stefan Pochmann: Last ones gives NameError: name 'password' is not defined.
• Stefan Pochmann: And now the user must input something but isn't told that they must do so.
• Mahi: @StefanPochmann oh master, show me how to do/while in Python. Like I already mentioned, "although this requires repeating the password = ...". There's no perfect do/while in Python, you either while True: (which I've shown) or repeat the input (which I've shown). If you have a better method, feel free to enlighten us ;)
• Stefan Pochmann: @MarkusMeskanen Simply initialize with password = None instead.

Answer 2

Change break instead of continue, should work.

• sntovas: So, there is no way to do this with continue?Sorry for the stupid questions i'm quite new at this.
• Stack: use break, it is provided for that reasn only to stop the loop, it is opposite of continue

Answer 3

First of all you're using the wrong logical operator for equality comparison, this: != is for not equals; and this == is for equals.

Second, as other have already stated, you should use break instead of continue.

I would do something like this:

print('Hello Steve!')
while True:
 password = input('Type your password: ')
 if password == '1234':
 print('Access granted')
 break
 else:
 print('Wrong password, try again')

Answer 4

Try using break statement instead of continue. Your code should look like this

while True:
 print('Hello Steve, what is the password?')
 password = input()
 if password == '1234':
 print('Access granted')
 break