Characteristics

• Key uniqueness: in map and set each key must be unique. multimap and multiset do not have this restriction.
• Element composition: in map and multimap each element is composed from a key and a mapped value. In set and multiset each element is key; there are no mapped values.
• Element ordering: elements follow a strict weak ordering^[1]

Associative containers are designed to be especially efficient in accessing its elements by their key, as opposed to sequence containers which are more efficient in accessing elements by their position.^[1] Associative containers are guaranteed to perform operations of insertion, deletion, and testing whether an element is in it, in logarithmic time – O(log n). As such, they are typically implemented using self-balancing binary search trees and support bidirectional iteration. Iterators and references are not invalidated by insert and erase operations, except for iterators and references to erased elements.The defining characteristic of associative containers is that elements are inserted in a pre-defined order, such as sorted ascending.

The associative containers can be grouped into two subsets: maps and sets. A map, sometimes referred to as a dictionary, consists of a key/value pair. The key is used to order the sequence, and the value is somehow associated with that key. For example, a map might contain keys representing every unique word in a text and values representing the number of times that word appears in the text. A set is simply an ascending container of unique elements.

As stated earlier, map and set only allow one instance of a key or element to be inserted into the container. If multiple instances of elements are required, use multimap or multiset.

Both maps and sets support bidirectional iterators. For more information on iterators, see Iterators.

While not officially part of the STL standard, hash_map and hash_set are commonly used to improve searching times. These containers store their elements as a hash table, with each table entry containing a bidirectional linked list of elements. To ensure the fastest search times (O(1)), make sure that the hashing algorithm for your elements returns evenly distributed hash values.

Performance

The asymptotic complexity of the operations that can be applied to associative containers are as follows:

Iterators

Maps may use iterators to point to specific elements in the container. An iterator can access both the key and the mapped value of an element:^[1]

// Declares a map iterator
std::map<Key, Value>::iterator it;

// Accesses the Key value 
it->first;

// Accesses the mapped value
it->second;

// The "value" of the iterator, which is of type std::pair<const Key, Value>
(*it);

Below is an example of looping through a map to display all keys and values using iterators:

#include <iostream>
#include <map>

int main()
{
    std::map<std::string, int> data 
    {
     { "Bobs score", 10    },
     { "Martys score", 15  },
     { "Mehmets score", 34 },
     { "Rockys score", 22  },
     // The next values are ignored because elements with the same keys are already in the map
     { "Rockys score", 23  }, 
     { "Mehmets score", 33 } 
    };
    
    // Iterate over the map and print out all key/value pairs.
    for (const auto& element : data)
    {
        std::cout << "Who(key = first): " << element.first;
        std::cout << " Score(value = second): " << element.second << '\n';
    }
    
    // If needed you can iterate over the map with the use of iterator,
    // Note that the long typename of the iterator in this case can be replaced with auto keyword
    for (std::map<std::string, int>::iterator iter = data.begin(); iter != data.end(); ++iter) 
    {
        std::cout << "Who(key = first): " << iter->first;
        std::cout << " Score(value = second): " << iter->second << '\n';
    }

    return 0;
}

For compiling above sample on GCC compiler, must use specific standard select flag.

g++ -std=c++11 source.cpp -o src

This will output the keys and values of the entire map, sorted by keys.