When to use the 'continue' keyword in C#

Question

Recently, I was going through an open-source project and although I have been developing for several years in .NET, I hadn't stumbled across the continue keyword before.

Question: What are some best practices or areas that would benefit from using the continue keyword? Is there a reason I might not have seen it previously?

Answer 1

You use it to immediately exit the current loop iteration and begin the next, if applicable.

foreach (var obj in list) {     continue;      var temp = ...; // this code will never execute } 

A continue is normally tied to a condition, and the condition could usually be used in place of the continue;

foreach (var obj in list) {      if (condition)        continue;      // code }  

Could just be written as

foreach (var obj in list) {     if (!condition)     {         // code     } } 

continue becomes more attractive if you might have several levels of nested if logic inside the loop. A continue instead of nesting might make the code more readable. Of course, refactoring the loop and the conditionals into appropriate methods would also make the loop more readable.

Answer 2

The continue keyword is used to skip the rest of the loop block and continue on. For example:

for(int i = 0; i < 5; i++) {    if(i == 3) continue; //Skip the rest of the block and continue the loop     Console.WriteLine(i); } 

Will print:

0 1 2 4