Cleaning up an STL list/vector of pointers

Question

What is the shortest chunk of C++ you can come up with to safely clean up a std::vector or std::list of pointers? (assuming you have to call delet

Answer 1

For std::list use:

while(!foo.empty()) delete foo.front(), foo.pop_front();

For std::vector use:

while(!bar.empty()) delete bar.back(), bar.pop_back();

Not sure why i took front instead of back for std::list above. I guess it's the feeling that it's faster. But actually both are constant time :). Anyway wrap it into a function and have fun:

template
void delete_them(Container& c) { while(!c.empty()) delete c.back(), c.pop_back(); }