c++ - Removing item from vector while iterating?

Question

I have a vector that holds items that are either active or inactive. I want the size of this vector to stay small for performance issues, so I want items that have been marked inactive to be erased from the vector. I tried doing this while iterating but I am getting the error "vector iterators incompatible".

vector<Orb>::iterator i = orbsList.begin();

    while(i != orbsList.end()) {
        bool isActive = (*i).active;

        if(!isActive) {
            orbsList.erase(i++);
        }
        else {
            // do something with *i
            ++i;
        }
    }

Answer 1

The most readable way I've done this in the past is to use std::vector::erase combined with std::remove_if. In the example below, I use this combination to remove any number less than 10 from a vector.

(For non-c++0x, you can just replace the lambda below with your own predicate:)

// a list of ints
int myInts[] = {1, 7, 8, 4, 5, 10, 15, 22, 50. 29};
std::vector v(myInts, myInts + sizeof(myInts) / sizeof(int));

// get rid of anything < 10
v.erase(std::remove_if(v.begin(), v.end(), 
                       [](int i) { return i < 10; }), v.end());