Hi, you should not be looping through the vector and deleting certain elements along the way, think of a vector as a growable array, everytime you delete something, it shifts all the elements up. Your last item is no longer valid.
Try using a list instead if you're doing all this deleting or maybe do a simple mark the element as invalid or swap them to the end of the vector and keep the number of elements in the vector yourself.



-Ken

Isn't the iterator invalidated when adding/removing items?

Yes, because elements may be assigned to a new memory location for vectors so iterators are invalidated. List doesn't use contiguous memory, and has O(1) for deletion. So it looks like he's probably better off using a list.

If you're only deleting the current element then the remove method should return a new valid iterator.
Oterwise you could keep track of the current index instead of an iterator and adjust it (decrease it by one) whenever deleting something before the current entry.

However frequently deleting entries in the middle of a vector is going to be slow. As tiburon stated you might want to use a linked list instead.

Another alterantive (if you're only deleting the current element) would be to keep track of both a source and destination pointer in the vector, and only copy the source onto the destination (and increase both indices) whenever you're not deleting.
There's also the famous "fill the hole with the last element" strategy, if you don't mind the vector getting out of order.

On my old project we actually developed a list that kept track of it's iterators just so they could be adjusted whenever an element had been deleted. In retrospect it might seem like overkill but it did solve some real problems and it's an interesting example of where STL just isn't enough.

Your original question was not really answered. If you want to delete items from a vector or list while iterating (without crashing :), do this:

std::list<int> myList; // let's assume this list has stuff in itstd::list<int>::iterator i;for (i = myList.begin(); i != myList.end(); /* NOTE: no ++i here! */){    if (*i < 5) // or whatever    {        // remove this item        i = myList.erase(i);    }    else    {        ++i;    }}

Swap all you to-be-deleted elements (continuous swapping with neighbors if order is important; swap with --end otherwise) to the end of the vector, then remove them.