How do I print the elements of a C++ vector in GDB?

Question

With GCC 4.1.2, to print the whole of a std::vector<int> called myVector, do the following:

print *(myVector._M_impl._M_start)@myVector.size()

To print only the first N elements, do:

print *(myVector._M_impl._M_start)@N

Explanation

This is probably heavily dependent on your compiler version, but for GCC 4.1.2, the pointer to the internal array is:

myVector._M_impl._M_start 

And the GDB command to print N elements of an array starting at pointer P is:

print P@N

Or, in a short form (for a standard .gdbinit):

p P@N

To view vector std::vector myVector contents, just type in GDB:

(gdb) print myVector

This will produce an output similar to:

$1 = std::vector of length 3, capacity 4 = {10, 20, 30}

To achieve above, you need to have gdb 7 (I tested it on gdb 7.01) and some python pretty-printer. Installation process of these is described on gdb wiki.

What is more, after installing above, this works well with Eclipse C++ debugger GUI (and any other IDE using GDB, as I think).

put the following in ~/.gdbinit

define print_vector
    if $argc == 2
        set $elem = $arg0.size()
        if $arg1 >= $arg0.size()
            printf "Error, %s.size() = %d, printing last element:\n", "$arg0", $arg0.size()
            set $elem = $arg1 -1
        end
        print *($arg0._M_impl._M_start + $elem)@1
    else
        print *($arg0._M_impl._M_start)@$arg0.size()
    end
end

document print_vector
Display vector contents
Usage: print_vector VECTOR_NAME INDEX
VECTOR_NAME is the name of the vector
INDEX is an optional argument specifying the element to display
end

After restarting gdb (or sourcing ~/.gdbinit), show the associated help like this

gdb) help print_vector
Display vector contents
Usage: print_vector VECTOR_NAME INDEX
VECTOR_NAME is the name of the vector
INDEX is an optional argument specifying the element to display

Example usage:

(gdb) print_vector videoconfig_.entries 0
$32 = {{subChannelId = 177 '\261', sourceId = 0 '\000', hasH264PayloadInfo = false, bitrate = 0,     payloadType = 68 'D', maxFs = 0, maxMbps = 0, maxFps = 134, encoder = 0 '\000', temporalLayers = 0 '\000'}}

'Watching' STL containers while debugging is somewhat of a problem. Here are 3 different solutions I have used in the past, none of them is perfect.

1) Use GDB scripts from http://clith.com/gdb_stl_utils/ These scripts allow you to print the contents of almost all STL containers. The problem is that this does not work for nested containers like a stack of sets.

2) Visual Studio 2005 has fantastic support for watching STL containers. This works for nested containers but this is for their implementation for STL only and does not work if you are putting a STL container in a Boost container.

3) Write your own 'print' function (or method) for the specific item you want to print while debugging and use 'call' while in GDB to print the item. Note that if your print function is not being called anywhere in the code g++ will do dead code elimination and the 'print' function will not be found by GDB (you will get a message saying that the function is inlined). So compile with -fkeep-inline-functions