Question

I am looping through a vector with a loop such as for(int i = 0; i < vec.size(); i++). Within this loop, I check a condition on the element at that vector index, and if a certain condition is true, I want to delete that element.

How do I delete a vector element while looping over it without crashing?

Answer 1

The idiomatic way to remove all elements from an STL container which satisfy a given predicate is to use the remove-erase idiom. The idea is to move the predicate (that’s the function which yields true or false for some element) into a given function, say pred and then:

static bool pred( const std::string &s ) {
  // ...
}

std::vector<std::string> v;
v.erase( std::remove_if( v.begin(), v.end(), pred ), v.end() );

If you insist on using indices, you should not increment the index for every element, but only for those which didn’t get removed:

std::vector<std::string>::size_type i = 0;
while ( i < v.size() ) {
    if ( shouldBeRemoved( v[i] ) ) {
        v.erase( v.begin() + i );
    } else {
        ++i;
    }
}

However, this is not only more code and less idiomatic (read: C++ programmers actually have to look at the code whereas the ‘erase & remove’ idiom immediately gives some idea what’s going on), but also much less efficient because vectors store their elements in one contiguous block of memory, so erasing on positions other than the vector end also moves all the elements after the segment erased to their new positions.