Concatenating two std::vectors

Question

How do I concatenate two std::vectors?

Answer 1

To be honest, you could fast concatenate two vectors by copy elements from two vectors into the other one or just only append one of two vectors!. It depends on your aim.

Method 1: Assign new vector with its size is the sum of two original vectors' size.

vector<int> concat_vector = vector<int>();
concat_vector.setcapacity(vector_A.size() + vector_B.size());
// Loop for copy elements in two vectors into concat_vector

Method 2: Append vector A by adding/inserting elements of vector B.

// Loop for insert elements of vector_B into vector_A with insert() 
function: vector_A.insert(vector_A .end(), vector_B.cbegin(), vector_B.cend());

Answer 2

I prefer one that is already mentioned:

a.insert(a.end(), b.begin(), b.end());

But if you use C++11, there is one more generic way:

a.insert(std::end(a), std::begin(b), std::end(b));

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Also, not part of a question, but it is advisable to use reserve before appending for better performance. And if you are concatenating vector with itself, without reserving it fails, so you always should reserve.

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So basically what you need:

template <typename T>
void Append(std::vector<T>& a, const std::vector<T>& b)
{
    a.reserve(a.size() + b.size());
    a.insert(a.end(), b.begin(), b.end());
}

Answer 3

Add this one to your header file:

template <typename T> vector<T> concat(vector<T> &a, vector<T> &b) {
    vector<T> ret = vector<T>();
    copy(a.begin(), a.end(), back_inserter(ret));
    copy(b.begin(), b.end(), back_inserter(ret));
    return ret;
}

and use it this way:

vector<int> a = vector<int>();
vector<int> b = vector<int>();

a.push_back(1);
a.push_back(2);
b.push_back(62);

vector<int> r = concat(a, b);

r will contain [1,2,62]

Answer 4

There is an algorithm std::merge from C++17, which is very easy to use when the input vectors are sorted,

Below is the example:

#include <iostream>
#include <vector>
#include <algorithm>

int main()
{
    //DATA
    std::vector<int> v1{2,4,6,8};
    std::vector<int> v2{12,14,16,18};

    //MERGE
    std::vector<int> dst;
    std::merge(v1.begin(), v1.end(), v2.begin(), v2.end(), std::back_inserter(dst));

    //PRINT
    for(auto item:dst)
        std::cout<<item<<" ";

    return 0;
}

Answer 5

I would use the insert function, something like:

vector<int> a, b;
//fill with data
b.insert(b.end(), a.begin(), a.end());

Answer 6

Or you could use:

std::copy(source.begin(), source.end(), std::back_inserter(destination));

This pattern is useful if the two vectors don't contain exactly the same type of thing, because you can use something instead of std::back_inserter to convert from one type to the other.