Necessity of writing print functions for containers?

Question

I use about 6 different C++ containers. I started writing print functions to output the container contents. Is this necessary? I would think this is part of the C++ library?<

Answer 1

It's not part of the library, but its easy to write with the tools provided:

C c; // Where C is a container type
std::copy(
    c.begin(), c.end()
  , std::ostream_iterator< C::value_type >( cout, " " )
);

For containers whose element is a pair (like map and I'd believe unordered_map) you'd need a custom Output Iterator to print the pair with the comma and brackets.