C++ sorting and keeping track of indexes

Question

Using C++, and hopefully the standard library, I want to sort a sequence of samples in ascending order, but I also want to remember the original indexes of the new samples.<

Answer 1

Beautiful solution by @Lukasz Wiklendt! Although in my case I needed something more generic so I modified it a bit:

template 
vector argSort(RAIter first, RAIter last, Compare comp) {

  vector idx(last-first);
  iota(idx.begin(), idx.end(), 0);

  auto idxComp = [&first,comp](size_t i1, size_t i2) {
      return comp(first[i1], first[i2]);
  };

  sort(idx.begin(), idx.end(), idxComp);

  return idx;
}

Example: Find indices sorting a vector of strings by length, except for the first element which is a dummy.

vector test = {"dummy", "a", "abc", "ab"};

auto comp = [](const string &a, const string& b) {
    return a.length() > b.length();
};

const auto& beginIt = test.begin() + 1;
vector ind = argSort(beginIt, test.end(), comp);

for(auto i : ind)
    cout << beginIt[i] << endl;

prints:

abc
ab
a