Custom Iterator in C++

Question

I have a class TContainer that is an aggregate of several stl collections pointers to TItems class.

I need to create an Iterator to traverse the elements in all the

Answer 1

An iterator is just a class that supports a certain interface. At minimum, you will want to be able to:

• increment and/or decrement it
• dereference it to get the object it "points" to
• test it for equality and inequality
• copy and assign it

Once you have a class that can do that sensibly for your collection, you will need to modify the collection to have functions that return iterators. At minimum you will want

• a begin() function that returns an instance of your new iterator type positioned at the first element
• an end() function that returns an iterator which is (possibly notionally) positioned at one past the end of the items in your container