Question

I need to write a simple function that will delete all entries in the List that contains objects of the class Elem. I wrote the function removeAllElements, but it does not work if the size of the List<Elem> is greater than 1.

public class Test {

public static void main(String[] args) {
        Work w = new Work();
        w.addElement(new Elem("a",new Integer[]{1,2,3}));
        w.addElement(new Elem("b",new Integer[]{4,5,6}));

        w.removeAllElements(); // It does not work for me.
    }
}    

public class Work {

    private List<Elem> elements = new ArrayList<Elem>();

    public void addElement(Elem e) {
        this.elements.add(e);
    }

    public void removeAllElements() {
        Iterator itr = this.elements.iterator(); 
        while(itr.hasNext()) {
            Object e = itr.next();
            this.elements.remove(e);
        }
    }

}

public class Elem {

    private String title;
    private Integer[] values;

    public Elem(String t,Integer v) {
        this.title = t;
        this.values = v;
    }

}

Edit#1
The error message is the following:

Exception in thread "AWT-EventQueue-0" java.util.ConcurrentModificationException
    at java.util.AbstractList$Itr.checkForComodification(Unknown Source)
    at java.util.AbstractList$Itr.next(Unknown Source)

Answer 1

The code doesn’t compile. What is this.tokens?

Anyway, if you want to remove an element while iterating, you must do it using the iterator’s remove method:

itr.next();
itr.remove();

Your removeAllElements method could just do this.elements.clear(), though. Much more straightforward and efficient.