Continue statements

A continue statement is used inside loops to skip the current iteration and move on to the next one.

In short, when a continue statement is encountered inside a loop, the loop skips back to the beginning of the loop for the next iteration, bypassing any code that’s left below to run.

Basic syntax

To continue to the next iteration of a loop, just add this line anywhere in the loop:

continue;

Example: using continue in a while loop

Here’s an example of a while loop that counts from 1 to 5, but uses a continue statement to skip printing the number 3:

int count = 1;
while (count <= 5) {
    if (count == 3) {
        count++; // Increment count to avoid infinite loop
        continue; // Skip the rest of the loop when count is 5
    }
    Console.WriteLine(count);
    count++; // Increment count by 1
}

Output:

1
2
4
5

Note that we increment count before the continue statement to avoid an infinite loop when count is 3.
If we didn’t do this, the loop would keep hitting the continue statement, because count would never change from 3.
We could also have done this by moving the count++ line to the very top of the loop (and then starting it at 0 instead of 1).

Example: using continue in a for loop

We can do exactly the same thing with a for loop. Here’s an example that counts from 1 to 5, but continues to the next iteration when the count is 3:

for (int count = 1; count <= 5; count++) {
    if (count == 3) {
        continue; // Skip the rest of the loop when count is 3
    }
    Console.WriteLine(count);
}

Output:

1
2
4
5

In this case, we don’t need to manually increment count before the continue statement, because the for loop automatically increments count at the end of each iteration (even if we use continue).

Continue statements outside conditions

Like with a break statement, if we are using continue to skip to the next iteration of a loop, it’s almost always inside some kind of condition (like an if statement) to decide when to skip the rest of the loop. Otherwise, any code below the continue statement would never run!