In a FOR, FOREACH, LOOP, or WHILE loop that has no label,
you can use the CONTINUE or EXIT statement to control the execution
of the loop.
CONTINUE causes the routine to skip the statements in the rest
of the loop and move to the next iteration of the FOR, LOOP, or WHILE
statement.
EXIT ends the loop and causes the routine to continue executing
with the first statement following the END FOR, the END LOOP, or the
END WHILE keywords.
Remember that EXIT must be followed by the FOREACH keyword
when it appears within a FOREACH statement that is the innermost loop
of nested loop statements. EXIT can appear with no immediately following
keyword when it appears within the FOR, LOOP, or WHILE statement,
but an error is issued if you specify a keyword that does not match
the loop statement from which the EXIT statement was issued. An error
is also issued if EXIT appears outside the context of a loop statement.
For
more information about loops in SPL routines, including labelled loops,
see Informix® Guide to SQL:
Syntax.
The
following figure shows examples of CONTINUE and EXIT within a FOR
loop.Figure 1. Examples
of CONTINUE and EXIT within a FOR loop.
FOR i = 1 TO 10
IF i = 5 THEN
CONTINUE FOR;
. . .
ELIF i = 8 THEN
EXIT FOR;
END IF;
END FOR;
Tip: You can use CONTINUE and EXIT to improve the
performance of SPL routines so that loops do not execute unnecessarily.