How to check that an element is in a std::set?

Question

How do you check that an element is in a set?

Is there a simpler equivalent of the following code:

myset.find(x) != myset.end()

Answer 1

I was able to write a general contains function for std::list and std::vector,

template
bool contains( const list& container, const T& elt )
{
  return find( container.begin(), container.end(), elt ) != container.end() ;
}

template
bool contains( const vector& container, const T& elt )
{
  return find( container.begin(), container.end(), elt ) != container.end() ;
}

// use:
if( contains( yourList, itemInList ) ) // then do something

This cleans up the syntax a bit.

But I could not use template template parameter magic to make this work arbitrary stl containers.

// NOT WORKING:
template class STLContainer, class T>
bool contains( STLContainer container, T elt )
{
  return find( container.begin(), container.end(), elt ) != container.end() ;
}

Any comments about improving the last answer would be nice.