How to find rank of an element in stl set in O(logn)

Question

I want to find rank of an element in stl set. I am able to traverse from beginning to that element and find out its rank but that is taking O(n). Is there any method to find the rank in O(logn).

Answer 1

No; a balanced tree does not need to store the number of descendants of each node, which is required to more quickly compute distance( s.begin(), iter ) for std::set s and iterator iter (which is what I suppose you mean). Therefore the information simply doesn't exist except by counting the items one by one.

If you need to perform many such computations, copy the set into a sorted, random-access sequence such as vector or deque, but then modification of the sequence becomes expensive.

A tree data structure that does what you ask probably exists in a free library somewhere, but I don't know of one.