How to increment an iterator by 2?

Question

Can anybody tell me how to increment the iterator by 2?

iter++ is available - do I have to do iter+2? How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

If you don't have a modifiable lvalue of an iterator, or it is desired to get a copy of a given iterator (leaving the original one unchanged), then C++11 comes with new helper functions - std::next / std::prev:

std::next(iter, 2);          // returns a copy of iter incremented by 2
std::next(std::begin(v), 2); // returns a copy of begin(v) incremented by 2
std::prev(iter, 2);          // returns a copy of iter decremented by 2