The continue statement

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A continue statement ends the current iteration of a loop. Program control is passed from the continue statement to the end of the loop body.

A continue statement has the form:

A continue statement can only appear within the body of an iterative statement, such as do, for, or while.

The continue statement ends the processing of the action part of an iterative statement and moves control to the loop continuation portion of the statement. For example, if the iterative statement is a for statement, control moves to the third expression in the condition part of the statement, then to the second expression (the test) in the condition part of the statement.

Within nested statements, the continue statement ends only the current iteration of the do, for, or while statement immediately enclosing it.

Examples of continue statements

The following example shows a continue statement in a for statement. The continue statement causes processing to skip over those elements of the array rates that have values less than or equal to 1.

/**
 ** This example shows a continue statement in a for statement.
 **/

#include <stdio.h>
#define  SIZE  5

int main(void)
{
   int i;
   static float rates[SIZE] = { 1.45, 0.05, 1.88, 2.00, 0.75 };

   printf("Rates over 1.00\n");
   for (i = 0; i < SIZE; i++)
   {
      if (rates[i] <= 1.00)  /*  skip rates <= 1.00  */
         continue;
      printf("rate = %.2f\n", rates[i]);
   }

   return(0);
}

The program produces the following output:

Rates over 1.00
rate = 1.45
rate = 1.88
rate = 2.00

The following example shows a continue statement in a nested loop. When the inner loop encounters a number in the array strings, that iteration of the loop ends. Processing continues with the third expression of the inner loop. The inner loop ends when the '\0' escape sequence is encountered.

/**
 ** This program counts the characters in strings that are part
 ** of an array of pointers to characters.  The count excludes
 ** the digits 0 through 9.
 **/

#include <stdio.h>
#define  SIZE  3

int main(void)
{
   static char *strings[SIZE] = { "ab", "c5d", "e5" };
   int i;
   int letter_count = 0;
   char *pointer;
   for (i = 0; i < SIZE; i++)             /* for each string   */
                                           /* for each each character */
      for (pointer = strings[i]; *pointer != '\0';
      ++pointer)
      {                                  /* if a number      */
         if (*pointer >= '0' && *pointer <= '9')
            continue;
         letter_count++;
      }
   printf("letter count = %d\n", letter_count);

   return(0);
}

The program produces the following output:

letter count = 5