CONTINUE v13

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The CONTINUE statement provides a way to proceed with the next iteration of a loop while skipping intervening statements.

When the CONTINUE statement is encountered, the next iteration of the innermost loop is begun, skipping all statements following the CONTINUE statement until the end of the loop. That is, control is passed back to the loop control expression, if any, and the body of the loop is re-evaluated.

If the WHEN clause is used, then the next iteration of the loop is begun only if the specified expression in the WHEN clause evaluates to TRUE. Otherwise, control is passed to the next statement following the CONTINUE statement.

The CONTINUE statement may not be used outside of a loop.

The following is a variation of the previous example that uses the CONTINUE statement to skip the display of the odd numbers.

DECLARE
    v_counter       NUMBER(2);
BEGIN
    v_counter := 0;
    LOOP
        v_counter := v_counter + 1;
        EXIT WHEN v_counter > 10;
        CONTINUE WHEN MOD(v_counter,2) = 1;
        DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('Iteration # ' || v_counter);
    END LOOP;
END;

The following is the output from above program.

Iteration # 2
Iteration # 4
Iteration # 6
Iteration # 8
Iteration # 10
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