Question

I’ve two vectors having pointers to my custom class object.
The pointers in these two vectors don’t point to the same object, but the values stored in the objects are same.

My custom class structure is:

Class Item
{
   string ItemId;
   string ItemDescription;
   float ItemPrice;
}

The first vector(V1) is having n entries and the second vector(V2) is having m entries (n>m).

I've to perform two operations:

Get a vector which has common objects in both V1 and V2. By common, I mean to say that the ItemId for the elements is same. (Can be referred as Intersection of V1 and V2).

Get a vector which has the elements which are not present in V2. (Can be referred as V1-V2).

How to do this in an efficient manner??

Answer 1

Here is example of how to do it using STL set_intersection and set_difference to get what you wanted:

class Item
{
public:
    Item(int i):ItemId(i){}

   int ItemId;
   string ItemDescription;
   float ItemPrice;

   bool operator<(const Item& rhs)
   {
       return ItemId < rhs.ItemId;
   }
   bool operator==(const Item& rhs)
   {
       return ItemId == rhs.ItemId;
   }
};

int main()
{
    std::vector<Item> myvec1;
    myvec1.push_back(Item(1));
    myvec1.push_back(Item(2));
    myvec1.push_back(Item(1));
    myvec1.push_back(Item(10));
    myvec1.push_back(Item(5));
    myvec1.push_back(Item(3));
    myvec1.push_back(Item(10));


    std::vector<Item> myvec2;
    myvec2.push_back(Item(10));
    myvec2.push_back(Item(1));
    myvec2.push_back(Item(10));
    myvec2.push_back(Item(1));
    myvec2.push_back(Item(3));

    std::sort(myvec1.begin(), myvec1.end());
    std::sort(myvec2.begin(), myvec2.end());

    myvec1.erase(std::unique(myvec1.begin(), myvec1.end()), myvec1.end());
    myvec2.erase(std::unique(myvec2.begin(), myvec2.end()), myvec2.end());

    std::vector<Item> myvec3; //Intersection of V1 and V2
    std::vector<Item> myvec4; //V1-V2
    set_intersection(myvec1.begin(),myvec1.end(), myvec2.begin(),myvec2.end(), std::back_inserter(myvec3)); //myvec3: 1 3 10
    set_difference(myvec1.begin(),myvec1.end(), myvec2.begin(),myvec2.end(), std::back_inserter(myvec4));   //myvec4: 2 5 
}