Cannot function C++ Linked List

Hello all,

This is my first post and I'm encountering a problem with a program I'm trying to create for a small game. What it involves is basically adding a Player onto a list using std::list.

Now, the issue with that is no matter what I do, only one of the values register so I need help to show you what is going wrong. Here is both General.h and General.cpp

First of all: General.h

Code:

class Player
{
	public:
		int id;
		string name;

		void printList();
		std::list<Player*> player_list;
};

That all seems satisfactory with me, that class. Moving onwards we come to General.cpp:

Code:

int main()
{
	Player *entity;
	int i = 0;

	while(i != 10)
	{
		entity = new Player;
		entity->id = i;
		entity->name = "Bobby";
		entity->player_list.push_back(entity);
		i++;
	}

	entity->printList();
	return 0;
}

void Player::printList()
{
	std::cout << "There are " << (int) player_list.size() << " players in the linked-list" << endl;
	return;
}

Okay so this seems decent to me and I've browsed many topics of linked-lists to come to this code. So my question to all of you is why is it only say that the list is a mere size of 1 when it should be right up to 11?

No idea, hopefully someone can assist me as soon as possible! Thanks.

You are missing an insertion operator (<<) in your cout statement in printList()

Okay amended that, it was just simply a typo not in the code itself, but what I had just typed up there onto the post.

No idea as to what the source of the problem could be?

Because each time through the while loop you are disregarding any previous Player objects and starting over fresh with a new Player;.

Since entity is just a pointer to a player object, when you assign it to a newly allocated player with

Code:

entity = new Player;

new is returning a new pointer which is then assigned to entity, and everything you did with the old entity is lost.

Even though it has already been added to the tail end of the player list?

If so, what is it that I'm missing for this piece of code to function correctly?

What you are doing currently is like creating a person who is holding a bucket, having him step into his bucket, and then on the next iteration of your loop creating a new person and having him step into his bucket. On the 10th iteration (not the 11th) you create a 10th person and have him step into his bucket. The other 9 people are ignored and forgotten at this point. So when you tell that 10th person to reveal how many people are in the bucket, he only sees himself.

You are confusing the logic of the list here. You want to have a list that contains Players, but what you are doing is creating a player who contains a list.

The class itself is mostly ok, but unless you want each player to have access to the list that it is in, you don't need to include the std::list<Player*> player_list.

Instead, in main you would want to create a list

Code:

int main()
{
  std::list<Player *> p_list;

Then in your while loop you can create new Players and add them to this list

Code:

  int i = 0;
  while (i != 10)
  {
    Player *entity = new Player;
    // set the player info here
    p_list.push_back(entity);
    i++;
  }

Now you probably wouldn't want to task any individual player in the list with reporting the size of the list (how many players it contains) so you would just print the p_list.size().

Code:

  std::cout << "There are " << p_list.size() << " players in the linked-list" << endl;
  return 0;
}

If you want to encapsulate handling how many players are in the list in a class, then you would probably want to create another class to manage the list of players. This new class would have a std::list<Player *> member, and in your while loop you would tell this class to add the Player you create and initialize in the while loop.

Originally Posted by xmr-mackayx

Okay amended that, it was just simply a typo not in the code itself, but what I had just typed up there onto the post.

You should always post code that compiles and exhibits the problem - just copy/paste from your IDE or text editor.