'continue' is targeting 'switch' statement

Reports the continue statements that are targeting switch statements. In PHP 7.3 and later, such usages are deprecated and will emit an E_WARNING, since they are most likely the result of a programming mistake.

Locating this inspection

By ID

Can be used to locate inspection in e.g. Qodana configuration files, where you can quickly enable or disable it, or adjust its settings.

PhpContinueTargetingSwitchInspection

Via Settings dialog

Path to the inspection settings via IntelliJ Platform IDE Settings dialog, when you need to adjust inspection settings directly from your IDE.

Settings or Preferences | Editor | Inspections | PHP | Code smell

In PHP, such continue statements are equivalent to break, that is, they end the execution of the current switch structure.
In other languages, such continue statements behave as continue 2 in PHP, that is, they take the execution to a higher level control structure (for example, the next iteration of an outer loop).

See continue (php.net), break (php.net), and switch (php.net) for details.

Inspection options

Here you can find the description of settings available for the 'continue' is targeting 'switch' statement inspection, and the reference of their default values.

PHP 7.3 Severity

Default value:

Warning

Other available settings:

Error
Weak Warning
Server Problem
Grammar Error
Typo
Consideration
Information

Suppressing Inspection

You can suppress this inspection by placing the following comment marker before the code fragment where you no longer want messages from this inspection to appear:

//noinspection PhpContinueTargetingSwitchInspection

More detailed instructions as well as other ways and options that you have can be found in the product documentation:

Inspection Details
By default bundled with:	IntelliJ IDEA 2025.2, PhpStorm 2025.2, Qodana for JVM 2025.2, Qodana for PHP 2025.2,

Last modified: 18 September 2025