C++ sorting and keeping track of indexes

Question

Using C++, and hopefully the standard library, I want to sort a sequence of samples in ascending order, but I also want to remember the original indexes of the new samples.<

Answer 1

Using C++ 11 lambdas:

#include 
#include 
#include       // std::iota
#include     // std::sort, std::stable_sort

using namespace std;

template 
vector sort_indexes(const vector &v) {

  // initialize original index locations
  vector idx(v.size());
  iota(idx.begin(), idx.end(), 0);

  // sort indexes based on comparing values in v
  // using std::stable_sort instead of std::sort
  // to avoid unnecessary index re-orderings
  // when v contains elements of equal values 
  stable_sort(idx.begin(), idx.end(),
       [&v](size_t i1, size_t i2) {return v[i1] < v[i2];});

  return idx;
}

Now you can use the returned index vector in iterations such as

for (auto i: sort_indexes(v)) {
  cout << v[i] << endl;
}

You can also choose to supply your original index vector, sort function, comparator, or automatically reorder v in the sort_indexes function using an extra vector.