Remove all elements in an associative array

Jonathan M Davis jmdavisProg at gmx.com
Fri Jun 24 20:54:00 PDT 2011


On 2011-06-24 20:41, Nub Public wrote:
> Is there a way to remove all elements in an associative array?
> 
> I tried clear() but it doesn't work. For some reason it sets the length
> of the array to gibberish. What does clear() do exactly?

clear invokes an object's destructor and puts it in an invalid state. You 
definitely don't want to do that to an associative array to empty it - if 
ever.

Generally, the simplest thing to do to clear out an AA is to simply create a 
new one. Either set the existing one to null or assign it a new AA. The old 
one can then be garbage collected. Now, if you actually need to remove all of 
the elements from the existing one (e.g. because multiple places in your code 
have references to it), then the only way that I'm aware of is to remove all 
of the elements one by one with remove.

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- Jonathan M Davis


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