Question

I came across this answer to the question of removing elements by value in C++:

C++ Erase vector element by value rather than by position?

Basically:

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

The answer makes sense, but isn’t this bad style? The logic is consists of a double negative… is there a cleaner way to do this?

Answer 1

Deleting an element from a collection consists of two steps:

• Moving down all subsequent elements to fill in the holes created by matches
• Marking the new end

With the C++ standard library, these are two separate functions, remove and erase, respectively.

One could certainly imagine an erase_if type of function which would be easier to use, but evidently the current code is considered good enough. Of course you can write your own remove_if.