Java 7 for Absolute Beginners

CHAPTER 5 ■ CONTROL FLOW, LOOPING, AND BRANCHING

};

int pawns = 0;

for (int i = 0; i < 8; i++) {

for (int j = 0; j < 8; j++) {

if (!pieces[i][j].contains("Pawn")) {

continue;

}

pawns++;

}

}

System.out.println("Surviving pawns: " + pawns);

When we encounter the continue statement, we jump over any other code in the loop and process

the next item.

Note that we can rewrite the body of the inner loop to not use a continue statement as in Listing

5-18:

Listing 5-18. Doing without the continue statement

if (pieces[i][j].contains("Pawn")) {

pawns++;

}

It turns out that writing an example of the continue statement that can't be rewritten to be simpler

without the continue statement is fairly hard to do, which is why continue statements don't appear in

code that often.

Like the break statement, the continue statement can use a label. As it happens, adding a label to a

continue statement in the chess example yields the same result, though with more processing. So let's

consider an example that counts the number of characters that appear before the first space in each

string within an array of strings (see Listing 5-19).

Listing 5-19. A continue statement with a label

String[] detectives = {"Sam Spade", "Sherlock Holmes", "Charlie Chan"};

int charactersBeforeSpaces = 0;

outer:

for (String str : detectives) {

char[] strChars = str.toCharArray();

for (char ch : strChars) {

if (ch == ' ') {

continue outer;

}

charactersBeforeSpaces++;

}

}

System.out.println(charactersBeforeSpaces);

This bit of code prints 18.