I was surprised to see my list of strings get truncated when I had a large
number of items in the list.

With 20,000 items in the list I could sort and make sure they were unique.
But when the number of items in the list went up to 40,000 the number of
items was truncated.

Am I hitting a maximum size of one of the data types? If so is there an easy
work around?

Thanks,
LM

#include "stdafx.h"

#pragma warning(disable:4786) // for STL implementation
#include <list>
#include <string>

using namespace std;

typedef list<string, allocator<string> > LIST_STR;

// comment out this next line to see the problem
//#define WORKS_OK

#ifdef WORKS_OK
 #define SIZE 10000
#else
 #define SIZE 20000
#endif

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
 LIST_STR    list;
 LIST_STR::iterator  it;
 int      i;
 char     c[256];

 // fill the list
 for (i=0; i < SIZE; i++)
 {
  list.push_back(itoa(i, c, 10));
 }

 printf("list size = %d\n", list.size());

 // add some duplicates to the list
 for (i=0; i < SIZE; i++)
 {
  list.push_back(itoa(i, c, 10));
 }

 printf("list size after adding duplicates= %d\n", list.size());

 list.sort();
 printf("list size after sort= %d\n", list.size());

 list.unique();
 printf("list size after unique= %d\n", list.size());

 return 0;

//output
//list size = 20000
//list size after adding duplicates= 40000
//list size after sort= 7232
file://list size after unique= 7232

You're hitting a known bug in list<T>::sort. For an easy fix, see:

http://www.dinkumware.com/vc_fixes.html

P.J. Plauger
Dinkumware, Ltd.
http://www.dinkumware.com