14.14 The continue Statement

A continue statement may occur only in a while, do, or for statement; statements of these three kinds are called iteration statements. Control passes to the loop-continuation point of an iteration statement.

ContinueStatement:

	continue Identifieropt ;

A continue statement with no label attempts to transfer control to the innermost enclosing while, do, or for statement; this statement, which is called the continue target, then immediately ends the current iteration and begins a new one. To be precise, such a continue statement always completes abruptly, the reason being a continue with no label. If no while, do, or for statement encloses the continue statement, a compile-time error occurs.

A continue statement with label Identifier attempts to transfer control to the enclosing labeled statement (§14.6) that has the same Identifier as its label; that statement, which is called the continue target, then immediately ends the current iteration and begins a new one. The continue target must be a while, do, or for statement or a compile-time error occurs. More precisely, a continue statement with label Identifier always completes abruptly, the reason being a continue with label Identifier. If no labeled statement with Identifier as its label contains the continue statement, a compile-time error occurs.

It can be seen, then, that a continue statement always completes abruptly.

See the descriptions of the while statement (§14.10), do statement (§14.11), and for statement (§14.12) for a discussion of the handling of abrupt termination because of continue.

The preceding descriptions say "attempts to transfer control" rather than just "transfers control" because if there are any try statements (§14.18) within the continue target whose try blocks contain the continue statement, then any finally clauses of those try statements are executed, in order, innermost to outermost, before control is transferred to the continue target. Abrupt completion of a finally clause can disrupt the transfer of control initiated by a continue statement.

In the Graph example in the preceding section, one of the break statements is used to finish execution of the entire body of the outermost for loop. This break can be replaced by a continue if the for loop itself is labeled:

class Graph {
	. . .
	public Graph loseEdges(int i, int j) {
		int n = edges.length;
		int[][] newedges = new int[n][];

		edgelists: for (int k = 0; k < n; ++k) {
			int z;

			search: {
				if (k == i) {
					. . .
				} else if (k == j) {
					. . .
				}
				newedges[k] = edges[k];
				continue edgelists;
			}//search
			. . .
		}//edgelists
		return new Graph(newedges);
	}
}

Which to use, if either, is largely a matter of programming style.