How to use range-based for() loop with std::map?

Each element of the container is a map<K, V>::value_type, which is a typedef for std::pair<const K, V>. Consequently, in C++17 or higher, you can write

for (auto& [key, value]: myMap) {
    std::cout << key << " has value " << value << std::endl;
}

or as

for (const auto& [key, value]: myMap) {
    std::cout << key << " has value " << value << std::endl;
}

if you don't plan on modifying the values.

In C++11 and C++14, you can use enhanced for loops to extract out each pair on its own, then manually extract the keys and values:

for (const auto& kv : myMap) {
    std::cout << kv.first << " has value " << kv.second << std::endl;
}

You could also consider marking the kv variable const if you want a read-only view of the values.


In C++17 this is called structured bindings, which allows for the following:

std::map< foo, bar > testing = { /*...blah...*/ };
for ( const auto& [ k, v ] : testing )
{
  std::cout << k << "=" << v << "\n";
}

From this paper: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2006/n2049.pdf

for( type-specifier-seq simple-declarator : expression ) statement

is syntactically equivalent to

{
    typedef decltype(expression) C;
    auto&& rng(expression);
    for (auto begin(std::For<C>::begin(rng)), end(std::For<C>::end(rng)); begin != end; ++ begin) {
        type-specifier-seq simple-declarator(*begin);
        statement
    }
}

So you can clearly see that what is abc in your case will be std::pair<key_type, value_type >. So for printing you can do access each element by abc.first and abc.second