Re: deleting dynamically allocated objects in a container

From:
"Leigh Johnston" <leigh@i42.co.uk>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Mon, 9 Aug 2010 17:16:18 +0100
Message-ID:
<OYCdnaOF1bhEtP3RnZ2dnUVZ8tCdnZ2d@giganews.com>
<subramanian100in@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:4497e00d-a5dd-4c17-af38-8947767cb078@k1g2000prl.googlegroups.com...

Suppose 'Test' is a class. I dynamically allocate few 'Test' objects
and push them into a vector<Test*>. I want to delete the dynamically
allocated 'Test' objects using a Standard Library Algorithm instead of
writing a hand-written 'for loop'.

Following is my attempt: (I am using cout statements in the ctor and
dtor only for understanding purpose).

#include <cstdlib>
#include <iostream>
#include <vector>
#include <algorithm>

using namespace std;

class Test
{
public:
       explicit Test(int arg = 0);
       ~Test();
private:
       int val;
};

inline Test::Test(int arg) : val(arg)
{
       cout << "From Test ctor: " << val << endl;
}

inline Test::~Test()
{
       cout << "From Test dtor: " << val << endl;
}

inline void delete_pointer(Test* & arg)
{
       delete arg;
       arg = 0;
}

int main()
{
       typedef vector<Test*> Container;
       Container c;
       c.push_back(new Test(100));
       c.push_back(new Test(200));
       c.push_back(new Test(300));
       for_each(c.begin(), c.end(), delete_pointer);
       // just to ensure the element values are zero, print them
       cout << c[0] << " " << c[1] << " " << c[2] << endl;

       return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

This porgram compiles fine with g++ and when run, produces the output:
From Test ctor: 100
From Test ctor: 200
From Test ctor: 300
From Test dtor: 100
From Test dtor: 200
From Test dtor: 300
0 0 0

My solution seems to work. But is there a better solution ?

My question is: in real-world applications, how do the dynamically
allocated objects stored in a container deleted ? Kindly provide the
code.


One lazy way is to use shared_ptr so the objects are deleted automatically.
Ideally you should be using unique_ptr instead but that is a C++0x feature.
Boost has its ptr_containers also.

/Leigh

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