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How can you erase elements from a vector while iterating?

Asked 2008-12-07T10:10:20.037
126

I want to clear a element from a vector using the erase method. But the problem here is that the element is not guaranteed to occur only once in the vector. It may be present multiple times and I need to clear all of them. My code is something like this:

void erase(std::vector<int>& myNumbers_in, int number_in)
{
    std::vector<int>::iterator iter = myNumbers_in.begin();
    std::vector<int>::iterator endIter = myNumbers_in.end();
    for(; iter != endIter; ++iter)
    {
        if(*iter == number_in)
        {
            myNumbers_in.erase(iter);
        }
    }
}

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
    std::vector<int> myNmbers;
    for(int i = 0; i < 2; ++i)
    {
        myNmbers.push_back(i);
        myNmbers.push_back(i);
    }

    erase(myNmbers, 1);

    return 0;
}

This code obviously crashes because I am changing the end of the vector while iterating through it. What is the best way to achieve this? I.e. is there any way to do this without iterating through the vector multiple times or creating one more copy of the vector?

c++ vector stl stdvector erase
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1 Answer

16

  1. You can iterate using the index access,

  2. To avoid O(n^2) complexity you can use two indices, i - current testing index, j - index to store next item and at the end of the cycle new size of the vector.

code:

void erase(std::vector<int>& v, int num)
{
  size_t j = 0;
  for (size_t i = 0; i < v.size(); ++i) {
    if (v[i] != num) v[j++] = v[i];
  }
  // trim vector to new size
  v.resize(j);
}

In such case you have no invalidating of iterators, complexity is O(n), and code is very concise and you don't need to write some helper classes, although in some case using helper classes can benefit in more flexible code.

This code does not use erase method, but solves your task.

Using pure stl you can do this in the following way (this is similar to the Motti's answer):

#include <algorithm>

void erase(std::vector<int>& v, int num) {
    vector<int>::iterator it = remove(v.begin(), v.end(), num);
    v.erase(it, v.end());
}
answered 2008-12-07T11:44:23.013

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