Question

I want to use STL algorithms on pointers and statically allocated arrays, but they all want iterators. Is there any iterator that will take an array and a length and let me use that?

P.S. I’m aware of the array class in C++0x, but I’d prefer not to use it.

Answer 1

Pointers are random-access iterators! You can simply pass a pointer to the start of the array, and a pointer to one past the end. Functions like these (included in C+11) may come handy:

template <typename T, std::size_t N>
T* begin(T(&array)[N]) { return array; }

template <typename T, std::size_t N>
T* end(T(&array)[N]) { return begin(array) + N; }