Erasing elements in std::vector by using indexes

Question

I've a std::vector<int> and I need to remove all elements at given indexes (the vector usually has high dimensionality). I would like to know, which is the most efficient way to do such an operation having in mind that the order of the original vector should be preserved.

Although, I found related posts on this issue, some of them needed to remove one single element or multiple elements where the remove-erase idiom seemed to be a good solution. In my case, however, I need to delete multiple elements and since I'm using indexes instead of direct values, the remove-erase idiom can't be applied, right? My code is given below and I would like to know if it's possible to do better than that in terms of efficiency?

bool find_element(const vector<int> & vMyVect, int nElem){
    return (std::find(vMyVect.begin(), vMyVect.end(), nElem)!=vMyVect.end()) ? true : false;
}

void remove_elements(){

    srand ( time(NULL) );

    int nSize = 20;
    std::vector<int> vMyValues;
    for(int i = 0; i < nSize; ++i){
            vMyValues.push_back(i);
    }

    int nRandIdx;
    std::vector<int> vMyIndexes;
    for(int i = 0; i < 6; ++i){
        nRandIdx = rand() % nSize;
        vMyIndexes.push_back(nRandIdx);
    }

    std::vector<int> vMyResult;
    for(int i=0; i < (int)vMyValues.size(); i++){
        if(!find_element(vMyIndexes,i)){
            vMyResult.push_back(vMyValues[i]);
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

I think it could be more efficient, if you just just sort your indices and then delete those elements from your vector from the highest to the lowest. Deleting the highest index on a list will not invalidate the lower indices you want to delete, because only the elements higher than the deleted ones change their index.

If it is really more efficient will depend on how fast the sorting is. One more pro about this solultion is, that you don't need a copy of your value vector, you can work directly on the original vector. code should look something like this:

... fill up the vectors ...

sort (vMyIndexes.begin(), vMyIndexes.end());

for(int i=vMyIndexes.size() - 1; i >= 0; i--){
    vMyValues.erase(vMyValues.begin() + vMyIndexes[i])
}

Answer 2

to avoid moving the same elements many times, we can move them by ranges between deleted indexes

// fill vMyIndexes, take care about duplicated values
vMyIndexes.push_back(-1); // to handle range from 0 to the first index to remove
vMyIndexes.push_back(vMyValues.size()); // to handle range from the last index to remove and to the end of values
std::sort(vMyIndexes.begin(), vMyIndexes.end());
std::vector<int>::iterator last = vMyValues.begin();
for (size_t i = 1; i != vMyIndexes.size(); ++i) {
    size_t range_begin = vMyIndexes[i - 1] + 1;
    size_t range_end = vMyIndexes[i];
    std::copy(vMyValues.begin() + range_begin, vMyValues.begin() + range_end,   last);
    last += range_end - range_begin;
}
vMyValues.erase(last, vMyValues.end());

P.S. fixed a bug, thanks to Steve Jessop that patiently tried to show me it