Is there a non-while loop Python equivalent of Java / C standard for loop with counter?

To skip an element you'll want to advance the iterator: it = iter(thing_to_iterate) for i in it: if i == stuff: it.next() The only danger here is if your are on the last element and try to skip ahead it will throw StopIteration.  This can be avoided by writing small utility function: def advance(it): try: it.next() except StopIteration: pass Another option is to use filter()/itertools.ifilter() to remove undesirable elements: for i in filter(lambda x: x != 7, thing_to_iterate): ... stuff ...

Java ish solution for i in xrange(10):       if i == 7:         continue       print i or Python ish solution. This is very similar to the generator posted [i for i in xrange(10) if i != 7]

If you really want to do this, you can define your own iterator, however, I don't think it's very "pythonic". class Citerator: def __init__(self, start, stop, inc): self.index = start self.stop = stop self.inc = inc def __iter__(self): return self def next(self): index = self.index if index >= self.stop: raise StopIteration self.index += self.inc return index def skip_next(self): self.index += self.inc myarray = list(range(10)) myiter = Citerator(0, len(myarray), 1) for i in myiter: if myarray[i] == 7: myiter.skip_next() print i