Re: Erasing in a vector while iterating through it

From:
 Greg Herlihy <greghe@pacbell.net>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Mon, 11 Jun 2007 08:25:10 -0700
Message-ID:
<1181575510.623643.79360@i13g2000prf.googlegroups.com>
On Jun 11, 7:41 am, Erik Wikstr=F6m <eri...@student.chalmers.se> wrote:

I have some code where there's this vector of pointers to objects and
I need to delete and erase some of them, the problem is that to know
which I need to iterate through the vector and I'm trying to do this
as efficient as possible. The code is something like this:

struct Thing {
  int value;
  Thing* ptr;
  Thing() : ptr(0) { }

};

// .....

std::vector<Thing*> vec;

So the vector contains pointers to Thing-objects, and for some of
those objects ptr might be set, in which case it will point to one of
the Things pointed to by the pointers in the vector. What I need to do
is to go through the vector and for each Thing where value has a
specific value I need to delete the Thing pointed to by ptr and erase
it from the vector. One way I could do that is to go through the
vector in one pass and collect all those pointers to some other
container and then make another pass and erase them but I'd prefer to
do it in one pass and was wondering if that is legal (something like
this):

std::sort(vec.begin(), vec.end()); // Sort one the address of the
Things

for (size_t i = 0; i < vec.size(); ++i) {
  if (vec[i]->value == SOME_VALUE) {
    std::vector<Thing*>::iterator it =
std::::lower_bound(cells.begin(), cells.end(), vec[i]->ptr);
    vec[i]->value = 0;
    vec[i]->ptr = 0;
    delete *it;
    --i; // Decrement if the Thing removed is before i in vec
    vec.erase(it);
  }

}


The usual solution is to combine std::remove() with an erase
operation:

    vec.erase( std::remove( vec.begin(), vec.end(), value_to_erase),
               vec.end());

Unfortunately, this line of code does not manually delete the items
before erasing them from the vector.

Therefore I would suggest eliminating the error-prone and laborious
manual deletion requirement and declare a
std::vector<shared_ptr<Thing> > instead of a std::vector<Thing *>.
With this one change, the one line of code illustrated above would
work as it should.

Greg

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