Way of determining the size of the container

Question

Is there any other way to determine size of the container than :

//those are valid iterators from a container
BidIt begin;
BidIt end;
std::size_t size = 0;

while (begin != end)
{//Here throug iterating I'm getting adventually the correct size
   ++size;
   ++begin;
}

but I wonder if I could check size of this container by for example substracting addresses of this iterators or something like this.
Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

You can use the distance function. Note that if your iterators are not RandomAccessIterators the distance function will use basically the same method of calculating the distance that you've shown.