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What are Iterators in C++?
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An iterator is an object that contains a countable number of values. An iterator is an object that can be iterated upon, meaning that you can traverse through all the values.
There are various kinds of iterators: input, output, forward, bidirectional, and random-access.
An iterator is an object (like a pointer) that points to an element inside the container. We can use iterators to move through the contents of the container. They can be visualised as something similar to a pointer pointing to some location and we can access content at that particular location using them.
In object-oriented programming, the iterator pattern is a design pattern in which an iterator is used to traverse a container and access the container's elements. The iterator pattern decouples algorithms from containers; in some cases, algorithms are necessarily container-specific and thus cannot be decoupled.
Iterators are a way of traversing a collection of objects. Typically, they allow you to access an STL (Standard Template Library) container sequentially in ways similar to accessing a classical C array with a pointer. To access an object through an iterator, you dereference it like a C pointer. To access the next object in a collection, you use the increment (++) operator. Some containers have multiple kinds of iterators that allow you to traverse the collection in different ways.
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