Using continue in a switch statement
Yes, it's OK - it's just like using it in an if
statement. Of course, you can't use a break
to break out of a loop from inside a switch.
It's syntactically correct and stylistically okay.
Good style requires every case:
statement should end with one of the following:
break;
continue;
return (x);
exit (x);
throw (x);
//fallthrough
Additionally, following case (x):
immediately with
case (y):
default:
is permissible - bundling several cases that have exactly the same effect.
Anything else is suspected to be a mistake, just like if(a=4){...}
Of course you need enclosing loop (while
, for
, do...while
) for continue
to work. It won't loop back to case()
alone. But a construct like:
while(record = getNewRecord())
{
switch(record.type)
{
case RECORD_TYPE_...;
...
break;
default: //unknown type
continue; //skip processing this record altogether.
}
//...more processing...
}
...is okay.
Yes, continue will be ignored by the switch statement and will go to the condition of the loop to be tested. I'd like to share this extract from The C Programming Language reference by Ritchie:
The
continue
statement is related tobreak
, but less often used; it causes the next iteration of the enclosingfor
,while
, ordo
loop to begin. In thewhile
anddo
, this means that the test part is executed immediately; in thefor
, control passes to the increment step.The continue statement applies only to loops, not to a
switch
statement. Acontinue
inside aswitch
inside a loop causes the next loop iteration.
I'm not sure about that for C++.
It's fine, the continue
statement relates to the enclosing loop, and your code should be equivalent to (avoiding such jump statements):
while (something = get_something()) {
if (something == A || something == B)
do_something();
}
But if you expect break
to exit the loop, as your comment suggest (it always tries again with another something, until it evaluates to false), you'll need a different structure.
For example:
do {
something = get_something();
} while (!(something == A || something == B));
do_something();