std:find() for sorted vs unsorted

Question

Consider two integer vectors v1 and v2, where v1 is sorted and v2 is not sorted. What would be the time complexities to search for an element in these two vectors using find()?

Answer 1

std::find() performs linear search, i.e., it goes element by element until it finds the value it's looking for. It is linear regardless of whether or not the collection is sorted.

If you have a sorted vector, you may want to consider performing binary search with std::lower_bound() instead. This will be logarithmic in the size of the vector.