What is ast.Continue in Python?

Abstract Syntax Tree

ast.Continue is a class defined in the ast module which expresses the continue statement in Python in the form of an Abstract Syntax Tree.

When the parse() method of ast is called on a Python source code that contains a continue statement, the ast.Continue class is invoked, which expresses the continue statement to a node in an ast tree data structure. The ast.Continue class represents the Continue node type in the ast tree.

Example

import ast
from pprint import pprint
class ContinueVisitor(ast.NodeVisitor):
    def visit_If(self, node):
        print('Node type: If\nFields:', node._fields)
        ast.NodeVisitor.generic_visit(self, node)    
    def visit_Compare(self, node):
        print('Node type: Compare\nFields:', node._fields)
        ast.NodeVisitor.generic_visit(self, node)
    def visit_Name(self, node):
        print('Node type: Name\nFields:', node._fields)
        ast.NodeVisitor.generic_visit(self, node)
    def visit_Constant(self, node):
        print('Node type: Constant\nFields:', node._fields)
        ast.NodeVisitor.generic_visit(self, node)
    def visit_Continue(self, node):
        print('Node type: Continue\nFields:', node._fields)
        ast.NodeVisitor.generic_visit(self, node)
    
    
visitor = ContinueVisitor()
tree = ast.parse("""
if x < 20:
   continue
""")
pprint(ast.dump(tree))
visitor.visit(tree)

Explanation

We define a ContinueVisitor class that extends from the parent class ast.NodeVisitor. We override the predefined visit_If, visit_Compare, visit_Constant, visit_Name, and visit_Continue methods in the parent class, which receive the If, Compare, Constant, Name, and Continue nodes, respectively.
In the method, we print the type and the fields inside the node and call the generic_visit() method, which invokes the propagation of visit on the children nodes of the input node.
We initialize a visitor object of the class ContinueVisitor.
We write Python code that contains an if block with a continue statement. We pass the code to the ast.parse() method, which returns the result of the expression after evaluation, and store the result in a tree.
The ast.dump() method returns a formatted string of the tree structure in a tree.
The visit method available to the visitor object visits all the nodes in the tree structure.