About Continue

SHORT DESCRIPTION

Describes how the Continue statement immediately returns the program flow to the top of a program loop.

LONG DESCRIPTION

In a script, the Continue statement immediately returns the program flow to the top of the innermost loop that is controlled by a For, Foreach, or While statement.

The Continue keyword supports labels. A label is a name you assign to a statement in a script. For information about labels, see about_Break.

In the following example, program flow returns to the top of the While loop if the $ctr variable is equal to 5. As a result, all the numbers between 1 and 10 are displayed except for 5:

while ($ctr -lt 10)
{
    $ctr += 1
    if ($ctr -eq 5)
    {
        Continue
    }

    Write-Host -Object $ctr
}

When using a For loop, execution continues at the <Repeat> statement, followed by the <Condition> test. In the example below, an infinite loop will not occur because the decrement of $i occurs after the Continue keyword.

#   <Init>  <Condition> <Repeat>
for ($i = 0; $i -lt 10; $i++)
{
    Write-Host -Object $i
    if ($i -eq 5)
    {
        continue
        # Will not result in an infinite loop.
        $i--;
    }
}

SEE ALSO

about_Break

about_For

about_Comparison_Operators

about_Throw

about_Trap

about_Try_Catch_Finally