continue is used within looping structures to skip the rest of the current loop iteration and continue execution at the beginning of the next iteration.
Note: Note that in PHP the switch statement is considered a looping structure for the purposes of continue.
continue accepts an optional numeric argument which tells it how many levels of enclosing loops it should skip to the end of.
<?php
while (list ($key, $value) = each ($arr)) {
if (!($key % 2)) { // skip odd members
continue;
}
do_something_odd ($value);
}
$i = 0;
while ($i++ < 5) {
echo "Outer<br>\n";
while (1) {
echo " Middle<br>\n";
while (1) {
echo " Inner<br>\n";
continue 3;
}
echo "This never gets output.<br>\n";
}
echo "Neither does this.<br>\n";
}
?> |
Ommiting the semicolon after continue can lead to confusion. Here's an example of what you shouldn't do.
<?php
for ($i = 0; $i < 5; ++$i) {
if ($i == 2)
continue
print "$i\n";
}
?> |
One can expect the result to be :
0 1 3 4 |
but this script will output :
2 |
because the return value of the print() call is int(1), and it will look like the optional numeric argument mentionned above.