How to navigate through a vector using iterators? (C++)

Solution 1:

You need to make use of the begin and end method of the vector class, which return the iterator referring to the first and the last element respectively.

using namespace std;  

vector<string> myvector;  // a vector of stings.


// push some strings in the vector.
myvector.push_back("a");
myvector.push_back("b");
myvector.push_back("c");
myvector.push_back("d");


vector<string>::iterator it;  // declare an iterator to a vector of strings
int n = 3;  // nth element to be found.
int i = 0;  // counter.

// now start at from the beginning
// and keep iterating over the element till you find
// nth element...or reach the end of vector.
for(it = myvector.begin(); it != myvector.end(); it++,i++ )    {
    // found nth element..print and break.
    if(i == n) {
        cout<< *it << endl;  // prints d.
        break;
    }
}

// other easier ways of doing the same.
// using operator[]
cout<<myvector[n]<<endl;  // prints d.

// using the at method
cout << myvector.at(n) << endl;  // prints d.

Solution 2:

In C++-11 you can do:

std::vector<int> v = {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5};
for (auto i : v)
{
   // access by value, the type of i is int
   std::cout << i << ' ';
}
std::cout << '\n';

See here for variations: https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/range-for