Question

I have an iterator and I want to return a pointer to the element it is pointing to.

Is this ok to do?

return &*iter;

It doesn’t really seem like a good idea.

Answer 1

It is perfectly fine. But be aware that if the iterator is of a container which deallocates and reallocates memory on resizing, then the returned pointer will become invalid. For example, if the iterator is an iterator of std::vector, then iter and &*iter both become invalid if the underlying vector resizes itself.

By the way, the title of the topic and what you said in the very first line, do not match:

Returning a pointer from an iter using &*iter (title)

I have an iterator and I want to return the element it is pointing to. (first line)

Both of these mean different. What you have written, i.e return &*iter is what you said in the title. But second statement means this:

return *iter;

It returns the element the iterator is syntactically pointing to. It does not return the pointer to the element. This is safe even if the vector resizes itself.