What is the "continue" keyword and how does it work in Java?

continue is kind of like goto. Are you familiar with break? It's easier to think about them in contrast:

• break terminates the loop (jumps to the code below it).

• continue terminates the rest of the processing of the code within the loop for the current iteration, but continues the loop.

A continue statement without a label will re-execute from the condition the innermost while or do loop, and from the update expression of the innermost for loop. It is often used to early-terminate a loop's processing and thereby avoid deeply-nested if statements. In the following example continue will get the next line, without processing the following statement in the loop.

while (getNext(line)) {
  if (line.isEmpty() || line.isComment())
    continue;
  // More code here
}

With a label, continue will re-execute from the loop with the corresponding label, rather than the innermost loop. This can be used to escape deeply-nested loops, or simply for clarity.

Sometimes continue is also used as a placeholder in order to make an empty loop body more clear.

for (count = 0; foo.moreData(); count++)
  continue;

The same statement without a label also exists in C and C++. The equivalent in Perl is next.

This type of control flow is not recommended, but if you so choose you can also use continue to simulate a limited form of goto. In the following example the continue will re-execute the empty for (;;) loop.

aLoopName: for (;;) {
  // ...
  while (someCondition)
  // ...
    if (otherCondition)
      continue aLoopName;

Let's see an example:

int sum = 0;
for(int i = 1; i <= 100 ; i++){
    if(i % 2 == 0)
         continue;
    sum += i;
}

This would get the sum of only odd numbers from 1 to 100.