Question

How can I save the value of min_element? It says it’s a forward iterator but I can’t seem to figure out how to save (assign to a variable to) it. I want to be able to access it by location in the vector. All I can find is examples of using the actual element (using *min_element() ). I tried

iterator< forward_iterator_tag, vector<string> > min_word_iterator = min_element(first_words_in_subvecs.begin(), first_words_in_subvecs.end());

but that didn’t work. I’m going to replace the element at that index with a different element.

Answer 1

You can use the distance provided by stl to find the position.
You need to pass the iterator returned by min_element to it to get the position

See this example code

#include <iostream>
#include <iterator>
#include <algorithm>
#include <vector>
using namespace std;

int main () {
  vector<int> myvec;
  int i = 0;
  for (i=8; i>0; i--)
  {
      myvec.push_back (i*10);
  }

  for (i=0; i<8; i++)
  {
      cout<<"At pos :"<<i<<"|val is:"<<myvec.at(i)<<endl;
  }

  int min_pos = distance(myvec.begin(),min_element(myvec.begin(),myvec.end()));
  cout << "The distance is: " << min_pos << "|value is "<<*min_element(myvec.begin(),myvec.end())<<endl;

  return 0;
}