Applescript equivalent of “continue”?

After searching for this exact problem, I found this book extract online. It exactly answers the question of how to skip the current iteration and jump straight to the next iteration of a repeat loop.

Applescript has exit repeat, which will completely end a loop, skipping all remaining iterations. This can be useful in an infinite loop, but isn’t what we want in this case.

Apparently a continue-like feature does not exist in AppleScript, but here is a trick to simulate it:

set aList to {"1", "2", "3", "4", "5"}

repeat with anItem in aList -- # actual loop
    repeat 1 times -- # fake loop
        set value to item 1 of anItem

        if value = "3" then exit repeat -- # simulated `continue`
        
        display dialog value
    end repeat
end repeat

This will display the dialogs for 1, 2, 4 and 5.

Here, you’ve created two loops: the outer loop is your actual loop, the inner loop is a loop that repeats only once. The exit repeat will exit the inner loop, continuing with the outer loop: exactly what we want!

Obviously, if you use this, you will lose the ability to do a normal exit repeat.