Comments on: Clearing an Array or Vector

By: skyboy

skyboy — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 19:05:53 +0000

There’s also this:

var i:int = vec.length, f:Boolean = vec.fixed;
vec.fixed = false;
vec.length = 0;
vec.length = i;
vec.fixed = f;

By: jackson

jackson — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:18:07 +0000

That would be a different meaning for “clear”. In the article, I used the term to mean “make the Array/Vector have zero length”. But since a non-zero length fixed-length Vector can’t have its length changed to zero, you would want to “clear” it by changing its values back to a default. For that, the best you can do is a for loop:

for (var i:uint, len:uint=myVector.length; i < len; ++i)
{
    myVector[i] = null; // or whatever you want to be the default (e.g. 0, false)
}

By: Frank

Frank — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 10:15:33 +0000

This is all well and good, but what about when you want to clear a fixed length Vector such as one created like this:

myVector = new Vector.(3, true);

It’s going to throw an error if you try to set myVector.length = 0;

By: jackson

jackson — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 16:35:49 +0000

Yep, like in AS2 and JavaScript, the [] syntax alone evaluates to a new Array object. Since you (unfortuantely) can't assign an Array to a Vector, you should get a compiler error. The more you read about Array and Vector, the more strange they get. Try doing a search for Array or Vector on this site for tons more information. Happy reading!

By: Simon C

Simon C — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 09:55:33 +0000

Although a Vector can use Array-like methods and member access such as vec[i] this article made me discover that unlike Arrays, a whole Vector cannot be cleared using vec = []