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Asked: 2026-05-15T11:06:01+00:00

I would like to pass arbitrary container as an argument of function and iterate

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I would like to pass arbitrary container as an argument of function and iterate over it (no erasing nor pushing elements). Unfortunately it looks like there is no standard way of doing this.

First solution which comes to my mind is an interface (let’s call it CollectionInterface) implemented by classes that will wrap STL containers. so the function declaration would look like:

f(const CollectionInterface * collection);

Or, I was thinking about method template, which has an advantage that it keeps binding at compilation time:

template <class CONTAINER> void f(const CONTAINER & collection);

Which way do you think is better?

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  1. Editorial Team

    ForwardIterator? This is a type of InputIterator (or OutputIterator) that also allows multi-pass algorithms (incrementing it does not invalidate prior values).

    Iterators (which are quite different from Java iterators) are the central thread unifying C++ collections. For examples of algorithms working on them (and associated iterator type requirements), you can start with <algorithm>. In particular, search provides an example of using ForwardIterator. It finds the first occurrence within the range [first1, last1] of the sequence defined by the range [first2, last2). These are all objects meeting the requirements of ForwardIterator.

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