Which statement accurately describes the purpose of the `continue` statement in C?

The purpose of the continue statement in C is to skip the current iteration of a loop and immediately proceed to the next iteration. When the continue statement is encountered within a loop (such as a for, while, or do-while loop), all remaining statements in that loop iteration are bypassed, and the control flow jumps back to the loop's condition-checking statement. This behavior allows for flexible control of the loop, enabling scenarios where certain conditions can be ignored or processed differently without exiting the entire loop.

For example, if you have a loop iterating through a set of numbers and you want to skip processing a specific value (like zero), using continue would allow you to effectively "ignore" that value and continue with the next iteration of the loop.

In contrast, other options do not accurately describe the function of the continue statement. The other choices involve exiting functions, restarting programs, or allowing repeated execution, which do not align with the specific behavior of the continue statement in C programming.