Container Classes

Qt's template-based container classes.

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The Qt Company Ltd.

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Publié le 27 décembre 2024 - Mis à jour le 27 décembre 2024

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Introduction▲

The Qt library provides a set of general purpose template-based container classes. These classes can be used to store items of a specified type. For example, if you need a resizable array of QStrings, use QVector<QString>.

These container classes are designed to be lighter, safer, and easier to use than the STL containers. If you are unfamiliar with the STL, or prefer to do things the "Qt way", you can use these classes instead of the STL classes.

The container classes are implicitly shared, they are reentrant, and they are optimized for speed, low memory consumption, and minimal inline code expansion, resulting in smaller executables. In addition, they are thread-safe in situations where they are used as read-only containers by all threads used to access them.

For traversing the items stored in a container, you can use one of two types of iterators: Java-style iterators and STL-style iterators. The Java-style iterators are easier to use and provide high-level functionality, whereas the STL-style iterators are slightly more efficient and can be used together with Qt's and STL's generic algorithms.

Qt also offers a foreach keyword that make it very easy to iterate over all the items stored in a container.

The Container Classes▲

Qt provides the following sequential containers: QList, QLinkedList, QVector, QStack, and QQueue. For most applications, QList is the best type to use. Although it is implemented as an array-list, it provides very fast prepends and appends. If you really need a linked-list, use QLinkedList; if you want your items to occupy consecutive memory locations, use QVector. QStack and QQueue are convenience classes that provide LIFO and FIFO semantics.

Qt also provides these associative containers: QMap, QMultiMap, QHash, QMultiHash, and QSet. The "Multi" containers conveniently support multiple values associated with a single key. The "Hash" containers provide faster lookup by using a hash function instead of a binary search on a sorted set.

As special cases, the QCache and QContiguousCache classes provide efficient hash-lookup of objects in a limited cache storage.

Class	Summary
QList<T>	This is by far the most commonly used container class. It stores a list of values of a given type (T) that can be accessed by index. Internally, the QList is implemented using an array, ensuring that index-based access is very fast. Items can be added at either end of the list using QList::append() and QList::prepend(), or they can be inserted in the middle using QList::insert(). More than any other container class, QList is highly optimized to expand to as little code as possible in the executable. QStringList inherits from QList<QString>.
QLinkedList<T>	This is similar to QList, except that it uses iterators rather than integer indexes to access items. It also provides better performance than QList when inserting in the middle of a huge list, and it has nicer iterator semantics. (Iterators pointing to an item in a QLinkedList remain valid as long as the item exists, whereas iterators to a QList can become invalid after any insertion or removal.)
QVector<T>	This stores an array of values of a given type at adjacent positions in memory. Inserting at the front or in the middle of a vector can be quite slow, because it can lead to large numbers of items having to be moved by one position in memory.
QStack<T>	This is a convenience subclass of