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?
You should use it sparingly.
The best (= easiest to read) loops do not use break or continue, they are a kind of structured goto statements.
Having said that, 1 or even 2 break/continue statements won't make a loop unreadable, but it pays to make their use clear and to keep it simple.
Think of it as a "return", but only applicable to the context of a loop. A common example is a state machine, looping over all available input.
while(!SomeQueue.Empty)
{
byte nextByte = SomeQueue.Dequeue();
switch State:
{
case A:
if(nextByte == Condition)
{
State = B;
}
else
{
State = ParseError;
}
continue;
case B:
//Test nextByte
State = C;
continue;
case C:
//Test nextByte
State = A;
continue;
case ParseError:
//Do something for this condition
State = A;
continue;
}