Question

So far, I have been storing the array in a vector and then looping through the vector to find the matching element and then returning the index.

Is there a faster way to do this in C++? The STL structure I use to store the array doesn’t really matter to me (it doesn’t have to be a vector). My array is also unique (no repeating elements) and ordered (e.g. a list of dates going forward in time).

Answer 1

Since the elements are sorted, you can use a binary search to find the matching element. The C++ Standard Library has a std::lower_bound algorithm that can be used for this purpose. I would recommend wrapping it in your own binary search algorithm, for clarity and simplicity:

/// Performs a binary search for an element
///
/// The range `[first, last)` must be ordered via `comparer`.  If `value` is
/// found in the range, an iterator to the first element comparing equal to
/// `value` will be returned; if `value` is not found in the range, `last` is
/// returned.
template <typename RandomAccessIterator, typename Value, typename Comparer>
auto binary_search(RandomAccessIterator const  first,
                   RandomAccessIterator const  last,
                   Value                const& value,
                   Comparer                    comparer) -> RandomAccessIterator
{
    RandomAccessIterator it(std::lower_bound(first, last, value, comparer));
    if (it == last || comparer(*it, value) || comparer(value, *it))
        return last;

    return it;
}

(The C++ Standard Library has a std::binary_search, but it returns a bool: true if the range contains the element, false otherwise. It’s not useful if you want an iterator to the element.)

Once you have an iterator to the element, you can use std::distance algorithm to compute the index of the element in the range.

Both of these algorithms work equally well any random access sequence, including both std::vector and ordinary arrays.