Question

I have a pointer to a array of pointers that I want to be safely deleted no matter where exceptions happen. Right now I have to loop through the array and call delete on each item and then call delete[] on the array. auto_ptr just seems to delete the the array but not the individual pointers inside the array. Is there a simple solution for this?

double** desc = new MyObject*[size_out];
for (int i=0; i<size_out; i++)
     desc[i] = new MyObject();

for (int i=0; i<size_out; i++)
    delete desc[i];
delete [] desc;

Thanks

Answer 1

I think what you will have to do is create a stack object which takes a pointer to an array of pointers and does the cleaning up in its destructor. Something like:

template <typename T>
struct ArrayDeleter
{
  ArrayDeleter(T** array, size_t size) 
  : m_array(array), m_size(size) 
  {}

  ~ArrayDeleter()
  {
    for (size_t i = 0; i != m_size; ++i)
    {
      delete m_array[i];
    }
    delete [] m_array;
  }

  T** m_array;
  size_t m_size;
};

There is no smart pointer that does this, so you just have to do it yourself.