Searching for a particular element in a stack

Question

I am interested in porting this Python code to C++. As part of the port, I am using std::stack from the header. How can I determine w

Answer 1

The C++ stack does not support random access, so there is no direct way using a stack to check if an element is contained. You can, however, make a copy of the stack and then continuously pop off that stack until the element is found.

Alternatively, if you do need to search the stack, you could consider instead using a deque, which does support random access. For example, you could use the find algorithm on a deque to search for an element:

find(myDeque.begin(), myDeque.end(), myValue);

If you need frequent searches of the stack, consider keeping a parallel set along with the stack that stores the same elements as the stack. This way, you can just use set::find to check (efficiently) whether the element exists.

Hope this helps!