Question

I have a vector of pointers like so:

vector<Item*> items;

I want to clear it. I’ve tried:

for (unsigned int i = 0; i < items.size(); i++)
    delete items.at(i);
items.clear();

,

while (!items.empty())
{
    delete items.back();
    items.pop_back();
}

,

while (!items.empty())
{
    delete items.at(0);
    items.erase(items.begin());
}

, and

while (!items.empty())
    delete items.at(0);

Every single one of these blows up for some reason or another, including deletion of already deleted objects and out of range vector iterators.

What do I do? I want to be able to reuse that same vector and add more Item pointers into it later. Just using delete without clearing still leaves junk pointers in there, right?

EDIT: Okay, I’ve switched to shared_ptrs. Now I have

vector<shared_ptr<Item> > items;

Yet, when I do items.clear(); , I get the error “vector iterators incompatible”. What am I still doing wrong?

Answer 1

Well, I did it. After a lot of time, a lot of aspirin, and a lot of lost hair, I finally figured out what the problem was. Turns out that I was calling a particular destructor earlier that contained the class which contained this vector of pointers. I had no idea that just calling a destructor would cause it to wipe all static data members. I hate c++ sometimes.