Continue

It is sometimes necessary to exit from the middle of a loop. Sometimes you'll want to start over at the top of the loop. Sometimes you'll want to leave the loop completely. For these purposes Java provides the break and continue statements.

A continue statement returns to the beginning of the innermost enclosing loop without completing the rest of the statements in the body of the loop. If you're in a for loop, the counter is incremented. For example this code fragment skips even elements of an array

for (int i = 0; i < m.length; i++) {

  if (m[i] % 2 == 0) continue;
  // process odd elements...

}

The continue statement is rarely used in practice, perhaps because most of the instances where it's useful have simpler implementations. For instance, the above fragment could equally well have been written as

for (int i = 0; i < m.length; i++) {

  if (m[i] % 2 != 0) {
    // process odd elements...

  }

}

There are only seven uses of continue in the entire Java 1.0.1 source code for the java packages.


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Copyright 1997 Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo@metalab.unc.edu
Last Modified July 14, 1997