Find a substring from a vector using iterators

Question

I am trying to make a search function in my application. If the user inputs a substring (or the complete string) I want to know if that substring matches any of the strings or part of the strings stored in my vector.

The following code is written so far:

cout << "Input word to search for: ";
cin >> searchString;


for (multimap <string, vector<string> >::const_iterator it = contactInformationMultimap.cbegin();       it != contactInformationMultimap.cend(); ++it)
{
    for (vector<string>::const_iterator iter = it->second.cbegin(); iter != it->second.cend(); ++iter)
    {
        if (*iter.find(searchString))
            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^   this does not work, if i cout *iter it is the correct word                     stored in the vector. The problem is that i can not use the find function.
    }                                 
}

Anyone having any suggestions?

Answer 1

Unary operators have less priority than postfix operators. In your if statement you need that the unary operator * would be evaluated before member access operator. So you have to write

if ( ( *iter ).find(searchString) != std::string::npos )

Or you could write

if ( iter->find(searchString) != std::string::npos )

Take into account that this record

if ( ( *iter ).find(searchString) )

makes no sense.

Also you could write

for (multimap <string, vector<string> >::const_iterator it = contactInformationMultimap.cbegin();       it != contactInformationMultimap.cend(); ++it)
{
    for ( const std::string &s : it->second )
    {
        if ( s.find(searchString ) != std::string::npos ) /*...*/;
    }                                 
}