To end a while loop prematurely in Python, press CTRL-C
while your program is stuck in the loop. This will raise a KeyboardInterrupt
error that terminates the whole program. To avoid termination, enclose the while loop in a try/except block and catch the KeyboardInterrupt
.
You can see the idea in the following code snippet:
try: while True: pass # Do something except KeyboardInterrupt: pass # Do something. Program doesn't terminate after CTRL-C print('hello world')
The while loop runs forever unless you end it prematurely using the CTRL-C
hotkey. But if you do, it prints the string 'hello world'
to the shell instead of terminating the whole program:
hello world
Let me show you how this works in the following GIF:

Programmer Humor
β Question: Why do programmers always mix up Halloween and Christmas?
β Answer: Because Oct 31 equals Dec 25.
(If you didn’t get this, read our articles on the oct()
and int()
Python built-in functions!)