Using custom std::set comparator

Question

I am trying to change the default order of the items in a set of integers to be lexicographic instead of numeric, and I can\'t get the following to compile with g++:

Answer 1

std::less<> when using custom classes with operator<

If you are dealing with a set of your custom class that has operator< defined, then you can just use std::less<>.

As mentioned at http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/container/set/find C++14 has added two new find APIs:

template< class K > iterator find( const K& x );
template< class K > const_iterator find( const K& x ) const;

which allow you to do:

main.cpp

#include 
#include 

class Point {
    public:
        // Note that there is _no_ conversion constructor,
        // everything is done at the template level without
        // intermediate object creation.
        //Point(int x) : x(x) {}
        Point(int x, int y) : x(x), y(y) {}
        int x;
        int y;
};
bool operator<(const Point& c, int x) { return c.x < x; }
bool operator<(int x, const Point& c) { return x < c.x; }
bool operator<(const Point& c, const Point& d) {
    return c.x < d;
}

int main() {
    std::set> s;
    s.insert(Point(1, -1));
    s.insert(Point(2, -2));
    s.insert(Point(0,  0));
    s.insert(Point(3, -3));
    assert(s.find(0)->y ==  0);
    assert(s.find(1)->y == -1);
    assert(s.find(2)->y == -2);
    assert(s.find(3)->y == -3);
    // Ignore 1234, find 1.
    assert(s.find(Point(1, 1234))->y == -1);
}

Compile and run:

g++ -std=c++14 -Wall -Wextra -pedantic -o main.out main.cpp
./main.out

More info about std::less<> can be found at: What are transparent comparators?

Tested on Ubuntu 16.10, g++ 6.2.0.