Removing tail element of priority queue

Question

How can I remove the tail element of a priority queue? I am trying to implement beam search using a priority queue and once the priority queue is full, I want to remove the last element(the element with the least priority).

Thanks!

Answer 1

No easy way. Copy elements from original to new except the last.

PriorityQueue removelast(PriorityQueue pq)
{

    PriorityQueue pqnew = new PriorityQueue();

    while(pq.size() > 1)
    {
        pqnew.add(pq.poll());
    }

    pq.clear();
    return pqnew;
}

called as

pq = removelast(pq);