Statements are the basic commands that express the behaviour of a C program. All other language constructs exist to help organize statements so that each has a specific meaning at its position in the program. Consequently, statements can only be used in certain places, namely function bodies.

There are several kinds of statement:

• expression statements that perform computations and have side-effects such as printing and file access;
• conditional statements and switch statements that allow one out of several groups of statements to be selected based on the current state of variables;
• iteration statements that permit enclosed statements to be executed multiple times;
• jump statements such as break, continue and goto, that are used in conditional and iteration statements; and
• block statements that syntactically combine several statements into one.

statement

goto-labelled-statement

switch-labelled-statement

compound-statement

null-statement

expression-statement

selection-statement

iteration-statement

jump-statement

goto-labelled-statement

identifier : statement

switch-labelled-statement

case constant-expression : statement

default : statement

compound-statement

{ block-item-list }

since C99

{ declarationsopt statementsopt }

until C99

null-statement

;

expression-statement

expression ;

selection-statement

if ( expression ) statement

if ( expression ) statement else statement

switch ( expression ) statement

iteration-statement

while ( expression ) statement

do statement while ( expression ) ;

for ( expressionopt ; expressionopt ; expressionopt ) statement

for ( declaration expressionopt ; expressionopt ) statement

since C99

jump-statement

goto identifier ;

continue ;

break ;

return expressionopt ;

A label can be attached to any statement, allowing it to be a target for a goto. Labels formed using case or default are only for use with switch.