• Sai (7/7) Aug 20 2004 Hello all,
• J C Calvarese (8/15) Aug 20 2004 I thought there were three methods for clearing the items from an associ...
• Ben Hinkle (27/31) Aug 20 2004 It depends :-)

Sai <Sai_member pathlink.com> writes:

Hello all,

Is there any easy way to clear all elements from an array or AA ?

For array, will this work ? is this efficient ?
array.length = 0 

And how to clear an AA with out using for loop ?

Thanks
Sai

J C Calvarese <jcc7 cox.net> writes:

In article <cg5hqv$kqr$1 digitaldaemon.com>, Sai says...
Hello all,

Is there any easy way to clear all elements from an array or AA ?

For array, will this work ? is this efficient ?
array.length = 0 

And how to clear an AA with out using for loop ?

Thanks
Sai

I thought there were three methods for clearing the items from an associative
array, but I could only find two:

1. aA = null; /* implementation-dependent */
2. foreach(char[] key; aA.keys) delete aA[key];  

See http://www.dsource.org/tutorials/index.php?show_example=104 for more
details.





jcc7

"Ben Hinkle" <bhinkle mathworks.com> writes:

 Is there any easy way to clear all elements from an array or AA ?

 For array, will this work ? is this efficient ?
 array.length = 0

 And how to clear an AA with out using for loop ?

It depends :-)

If you just want to clear the variable without regard to maintaining the
capacity of the existing hash table, you can run
 array = array.init;
Note if you had any other variables referring to the array data, like
 array2 = array;
 array = array.init;
then array2 will not be affected.

If you want to preserve the capacity of the hash table and simultaneously
clear out the actual array contents so that all variables referring to the
same array will be cleared, you'll need to use some compiler-dependent code.
The following is copied from my MinTL library - you can use it however you
like:
/** Clear the contents of an associative array without losing
 *  capacity. Compiler-dependent.
 *  \param x the array to clear
 */
template reset(Key,Value) {
  void reset(Value[Key] x) {
    void*[] a = cast(void*[])x;
    a[] = null;
  }
}

For example:
int[int] array;
...
reset!(int,int)(array);