Functions for Multidimensional Vectors

Section 14.7 Functions for Multidimensional Vectors

When writing functions with multidimensional vectors, we should follow the same guideline as writing functions for normal vectors. Primarily, we should use pass by reference to avoid making needless copies of our data. If we don’t intend on modifying the data, we should use pass by const reference.

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If we are writing multiple functions that all work with the same multidimensional data type, a typedef make make our code easier to read. For example, say we are working with two dimensional vectors of integers and want to write a function doubleAll that takes a table of data as a parameter, and returns a new table where all the values are doubled. We can either use the prototype on line 1, or we can do the typedef on line 3 and then write the prototype shown on line 4.

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vector<vector<int>> doubleAll(const vector<vector<int>>& table);

typedef vector<vector<int>> IntTable;
IntTable doubleAll(const IntTable& table);

In this sample, we use two functions to work with a multidimensional collection of numbers:

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Listing 14.7.1.

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#include <iostream>
#include <vector>
using namespace std;

typedef vector<vector<int>> IntTable;

IntTable doubleAll(const IntTable& table) {
    // Copy the input table to a new table
    // to make sure the result is the same size as the input
    IntTable result = table;

// Now modify the result table
    size_t rowCount = result.size();
    for (size_t row = 0; row < rowCount; ++row) {
        size_t colCount = result.at(row).size();
        for (size_t col = 0; col < colCount; ++col) {
            result.at(row).at(col) *= 2;
        }
    }
    return result;
}

void print(const IntTable& table) {
  size_t rowCount = table.size();
  for (size_t row = 0; row < rowCount; ++row) {
      size_t colCount = table.at(row).size();
      for (size_t col = 0; col < colCount; ++col) {
          cout << table.at(row).at(col) << " ";
      }
      cout << endl;
  }
}

int main() {
    // Create a 2D vector (3x4) and initialize it
    IntTable matrix = {
        {1, 2, 3, 4},
        {5, 6, 7, 8},
        {9, 10, 11, 12}
    };

IntTable doubled = doubleAll(matrix);
    print(doubled);
}

Note that these functions calculate the colCount for each row. Previous samples calculated one colCount based on the size of the first row. Calculating each row’s length independently means these functions will work correctly on “jagged” structures. Rectangular data has the same number of columns in every row. In non-rectangular or jagged data, each row can have a different length.

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// Jagged data
1 2
3 4 5
6

// Rectangular data
1 2 3
4 5 6

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