continue command

Synopsis

/continue

Description

continue ends the current loop iteration early, skipping the remaining commands in that body. The innermost active loop that handles a continue then proceeds with its next iteration.

Supported loops include do with while, while, until, foreach, the fe/fec family, and for forms using a numeric range, a list, or parenthesized initialization/test/iteration statements.

For while and until, the condition is tested again. Numeric-range and list forms of for advance normally. In parenthesized for, the iteration statement still runs before the next condition test. foreach, fe, and fec advance to their next items; mapping variants collect the current variables before handling the continue.

There is one important difference from reaching the end normally: in the current do { ... } while (...) implementation, continue immediately restarts the body and skips that iteration's trailing condition test. A continue reached on every iteration can therefore prevent the condition from ending that loop.

There are no options or required arguments, and supplied arguments are ignored. The command produces no output on success, is available in every build, and requires no IRC connection.

Restrictions

Outside an active continue-handling loop, the command prints Cannot CONTINUE here. and does not interrupt execution. A plain block, alias call, or switch case is not itself a continue handler.

The context is determined at execution time. A continue inside an alias called from a running loop can propagate through that call and skip the rest of the enclosing loop's iteration, unless an inner loop handles it first. A continue inside a switch case can likewise reach an enclosing loop.

Use break to leave a loop instead of advancing it, or return to finish an alias call. continue does not return a value.

Example

This script displays the numbers 0 through 10 except 4. The @ loop++ iteration statement still executes after the continue:

for (@ loop = 0, loop <= 10, @ loop++) {
    if (loop == 4) { continue }
    echo $loop of 10, skipping 4.
}

At the interactive input prompt, prefix command statements with /.

History

The continue command first appeared in EPIC4pre1.031.

Source

See source/commands.c for the registration, continuecmd() error handling, and parse_block() propagation. source/if.c implements loop-specific handling in docmd(), whilecmd(), foreach(), fe(), for_next_cmd(), for_fe_cmd(), and loopcmd().