The continue statement is used to skip the present iteration of a for, while, or do-while loop. The unlabeled form evaluates the boolean expression that controls the loop by skipping to the conclusion of the innermost loop’s body. The program “ContinueDemo” iterates through a string, tallying the occurrences of the string “p”. The continue statement ignores the remainder of the loop and advances to the subsequent character if the current character is not a p. A “p” results in the program increasing the letter quantity.

class ContinueDemo {
    public static void main(String[] args) {

        String searchMe = "peter piper picked a peck of pickled peppers";
        int max = searchMe.length();
        int numPs = 0;

        for (int i = 0; i < max; i++) {
            //interested only in p's
            if (searchMe.charAt(i) != 'p')
                continue;

            //process p's
            numPs++;
        }
        System.out.println("Found " + numPs + " p's in the string.");
    }
}

This program generates the following output:
Found 9 p’s in the string.
To more obviously observe this effect, attempt to remove the continue statement and recompile. The tally will be inaccurate when the program is re-run, indicating that 35 p’s were identified instead of 9.
A continue statement that is labeled bypasses the current iteration of an outer loop that is identified with the specified label. Nested loops are employed in the example program, ContinueWithLabelDemo, to locate a substring within another string. Two nested loops are necessary: one to iterate over the substring and another to iterate over the string being searched. The labeled form of continue is employed in the ContinueWithLabelDemo program to bypass an iteration in the outer loop.

class ContinueWithLabelDemo {
    public static void main(String[] args) {

        String searchMe = "Look for a substring in me";
        String substring = "sub";
        boolean foundIt = false;

        int max = searchMe.length() - substring.length();

    test:
        for (int i = 0; i <= max; i++) {
            int n = substring.length();
            int j = i;
            int k = 0;
            while (n-- != 0) {
                if (searchMe.charAt(j++)
                        != substring.charAt(k++)) {
                    continue test;
                }
            }
            foundIt = true;
                 break test;
        }
        System.out.println(foundIt ? "Found it" :
                                     "Didn't find it");
    }
}

This program generates the following output.
Found it