Question

Quite frequently I need to extract the N (> 1) highest elements from an unsorted STL container. The naive way to do this is using <queue>.

Is there a quicker, less boilerplate way?

Answer 1

std::partial_sort if you need them in order, otherwise std::nth_element, using greater as your predicate in either case.

I can’t tell if by extract you mean you want to remove, but if you do then another option is heapifying your container with make_heap and then yanking the N elements out of it.