What is the purpose of a continue statement in a loop?

The continue statement in a loop is used to skip the rest of the current iteration and move on to the next iteration of the loop. When the continue statement is encountered, control is immediately transferred to the beginning of the next iteration, allowing you to selectively bypass certain parts of the loop based on specific conditions.

Here's a simple example in Python:

count = 1
while count <= 10:
    if count % 2 == 0:  # If count is even, skip the rest of the current iteration
        count += 1
        continue
    print(count)  # This line will only be executed if count is odd
    count += 1

In this example, the loop prints only odd numbers from 1 to 10 by using the continue statement to skip even numbers.