C++ Primer Plus

Using the STL

The STL is a library whose parts are designed to work together. The STL components are tools, but they are also building blocks to create other tools. Let’s illustrate this with an example. Suppose you want to write a program that lets the user enter words. At the end, you’d like a record of the words as they were entered, an alphabetical list of the words used (capitalization differences ignored), and a record of how many times each word was entered. To keep things simple, let’s assume that the input contains no numbers or punctuation.

Entering and saving the list of words is simple enough. Following the example of Listings 16.8 and 16.9, you can create a vector<string> object and use push_back() to add input words to the vector: ...