How can I store objects of differing types in a C++ container?

by

You could use (or re-implement) boost::any and store instances of boost::any in a container. That would be the safest, since boost::any has probably dealt with much of the edge cases and complexity involved in solving this kind of problem in the general case.

If you want to do something quick and dirty, create a structure or perhaps a union containing members of all potential types along with an enumeration or other indicator of which type is ‘active’ in the object. Be especially careful with unions as they have some interesting properties (such as invoking undefined behavior if you read the wrong union member, only one of the members can be ‘active’ at a time, the one that was most recently written to).

I’m curious what you’re doing that you need such a construct, though.

More Related Contents:

  1. Title Name not showing and background color not changing
  2. When to use virtual destructors?
  3. Why does an overridden function in the derived class hide other overloads of the base class?
  4. Polymorphism in C++
  5. Converting std::__cxx11::string to std::string
  6. How much is too much with C++11 auto keyword?
  7. Pure virtual destructor in C++
  8. Why isn’t vector a STL container?
  9. What’s the difference between size_t and int in C++?
  10. “Incomplete type” in class which has a member of the same type of the class itself
  11. Vectors and polymorphism in C++
  12. using std::is_same, why my function still can’t work for 2 types
  13. How to copy/create derived class instance from a pointer to a polymorphic base class?
  14. What are declarations and declarators and how are their types interpreted by the standard?
  15. Why does storing references (not pointers) in containers in C++ not work?
  16. Vector that can have 3 different data types C++
  17. c++: can vector contain objects of type Derived?
  18. How to define different types for the same class in C++
  19. Is there a 128 bit integer in C++?
  20. Does delete work with pointers to base class?
  21. Why can’t I do polymorphism with normal variables?
  22. How do unsigned integers work
  23. What is the type of a string literal in C++? [duplicate]
  24. mixing templates with polymorphism
  25. What is a scalar Object in C++?
  26. What is uint_fast32_t and why should it be used instead of the regular int and uint32_t?
  27. is it possible to make function that will accept multiple data types for given argument?
  28. General use cases for C++ containers
  29. Double dispatch/multimethods in C++
  30. list of polymorphic objects

Leave a Comment