More Than Equations

Oops! I Didn't Mean That

2 min read

🔖 Background Information

This lab is available courtesy of Professor Jason James (James, 2018).

🎯 Problem Statement

Write a function that takes a single vector<T> as an argument and removes all duplicate items from it.

✅ Acceptance Criteria

  • Create a function called remove_duplicates<T>(...) that takes a C++ vector as its single argument.
  • The function should return a new vector that removes all of the duplicate items from the original. Do NOT overwrite the original vector.

📋 Dev Notes

  • You can assume that the elements of the vector can be compared via the == operator.
  • Use template functions to implement your solution.

🖥️ Example Output

A driver program for this problem might look something like this:

#include <iostream>
#include <vector>
 
using namespace std;
 
vector<T> remove_duplicates<T>(...) {
  // Your code goes here
}
 
int main()
{
  vector<int> my_vector;
 
  for (int i = 1; i < 3; i++)
  {
    my_vector.push_back(i);
    my_vector.push_back(i);
  }
 
  // If I were to print out the elements of my_vector, I would see 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3
 
  vector<int> filtered_vector = remove_duplicates(my_vector);
 
  // If I were to print out the elements of filtered_vector, I would see 1, 2, 3
  // If I were to print out the elements of my_vector, I would see 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3
}

📝 Thought Provoking Questions

  1. How did you iterate through all of the elements in a vector without passing in an argument for the size of the vector?
  2. How did you access the item at a specific position in the vector?
  3. How did you detect that an element was repeated?

💼 Add-Ons For the Portfolio

(Two Credits) Set Container

A set is a type of container that stores unique elements. Create another function called remove_duplicates_via_set<T>(...) that performs the same job as remove_duplicates<T>(...), but uses a set in its implementation.

🔗 Useful Links

N/A

📘 Works Cited

James, J. (2018). Oops! I Didn’t Mean That... In Jason James’ Homepage. http://craie-programming.org/121/labs/rem_rept.html

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