I have looked at find and binary_search, but find doesn't take advantage of the fact that the vector is sorted, and binary_search only returns a true or false, not where it found the value. Is there any function that can give me the best of both worlds?
You can use find to locate a particular element in any container in time O(N). With vector you can do random access and take advantage of the lower_bound (log2(N)), upper_bound, or equal_range class of std algorithms. std::lower_bound will do that for you. It's in the equivalent-behavior section at the top for binary_search. However, the utility of binary_search is limited to yes and no answers (maybe the naming needs to be improved in the future version of C++; binary_in()).