Deleting an object in a vector of pointers

[FumarMata]

Hello

I have a vector of pointers to objects of the Ball class. I am trying to delete the last one, but I'm not sure if I'm doing it correctly:

// Creation of the vector of pointers
std::vector<Ball *> bola;


// Addition of some pointers to objects
for (int i=0; i<10; i++) {
	bola.push_back(new Ball());
}

// I perform some operations
for (int i=0; i<10 i++) {
	bola[i]->draw();
}




int bola_length = bola.size();	// size of the vector
for(int i=bola_length;i>bola_length-1;i--){
	delete bola[i-1];	// delete the object referenced by the pointer
	bola.pop_back();	// shortening the vector (and deleting the pointer?)
	cout << bola.size() << "\n";	// checking new size of the vector
}

Is it correct?

Thank you

marc

[Athar]

It is correct, although I don't get why you need some mind-twisting loop just to delete the last element.

delete bola.back();
bola.pop_back();

would've been sufficient.

Using a vector to store pointers is very error-prone and violates RAII, though. You should use boost::ptr_vector instead.

[FumarMata]

Thanks Athar

The last loop is because I delete batches of 5 elements, but I simplified the example and forgot to remove the loop.

I also tried to create a vector of objects (instead of a vector of pointers to objects) but had problems when creating them in a loop. Example:

// Creation of the vector of objects
std::vector<Ball> bola;

for (int i=0; i<numballs; i++) {
	Ball temp;	// creation of a temporary Ball
	bola.push_back(temp);	// storing the temporary Ball in the vector
}

The problem here is that when "temp" is destroyed in every iteration, it's destructor is also called, which caused some trouble. Is there some way to avoid that?

Thanks!

marc

[jsmith]

If Ball is properly copyable, then that should not be a problem.