Why is there no transform_if in the C++ standard l

Question

A use case emerged when wanting to do a contitional copy (1. doable with copy_if) but from a container of values to a container of pointers to those values (2. doable with transform).

With the available tools I can't do it in less than two steps :

#include <vector>
#include <algorithm>

using namespace std;

struct ha { 
    int i;
    explicit ha(int a) : i(a) {}
};

int main() 
{
    vector<ha> v{ ha{1}, ha{7}, ha{1} }; // initial vector
    // GOAL : make a vector of pointers to elements with i < 2
    vector<ha*> ph; // target vector
    vector<ha*> pv; // temporary vector
    // 1. 
    transform(v.begin(), v.end(), back_inserter(pv), 
        [](ha &arg) { return &arg; }); 
    // 2. 
    copy_if(pv.begin(), pv.end(), back_inserter(ph),
        [](ha *parg) { return parg->i < 2;  }); // 2. 

    return 0;
}

Ofcourse we could call remove_if on pv and eliminate the need for a temporary, better yet though, it's not difficult to implement (for unary operations) something like this :

template <
    class InputIterator, class OutputIterator, 
    class UnaryOperator, class Pred
>
OutputIterator transform_if(InputIterator first1, InputIterator last1,
                            OutputIterator result, UnaryOperator op, Pred pred)
{
    while (first1 != last1) 
    {
        if (pred(*first1)) {
            *result = op(*first1);
            ++result;
        }
        ++first1;
    }
    return result;
}

// example call 
transform_if(v.begin(), v.end(), back_inserter(ph), 
[](ha &arg) { return &arg;      }, // 1. 
[](ha &arg) { return arg.i < 2; });// 2.

1. Is there a more elegant workaround with the available C++ standard library tools ?
2. Is there a reason why transform_if does not exist in the library? Is the combination of the existing tools a sufficient workaround and/or considered performance wise well behaved ?

Answer 1

After just finding this question again after some time, and devising a whole slew of potentially useful generic iterator adaptors I realized that the original question required NOTHING more than std::reference_wrapper.

Use it instead of a pointer, and you're good:

Live On Coliru

#include <algorithm>
#include <functional> // std::reference_wrapper
#include <iostream>
#include <vector>

struct ha {
    int i;
};

int main() {
    std::vector<ha> v { {1}, {7}, {1}, };

    std::vector<std::reference_wrapper<ha const> > ph; // target vector
    copy_if(v.begin(), v.end(), back_inserter(ph), [](const ha &parg) { return parg.i < 2; });

    for (ha const& el : ph)
        std::cout << el.i << " ";
}

Prints

1 1 

Answer 2

This is just an answer to question 1 "Is there a more elegant workaround with the available C++ standard library tools ?".

If you can use c++17 then you can use std::optional for a simpler solution using only C++ standard library functionality. The idea is to return std::nullopt in case there is no mapping:

See live on Coliru

#include <iostream>
#include <optional>
#include <vector>

template <
    class InputIterator, class OutputIterator, 
    class UnaryOperator
>
OutputIterator filter_transform(InputIterator first1, InputIterator last1,
                            OutputIterator result, UnaryOperator op)
{
    while (first1 != last1) 
    {
        if (auto mapped = op(*first1)) {
            *result = std::move(mapped.value());
            ++result;
        }
        ++first1;
    }
    return result;
}

struct ha { 
    int i;
    explicit ha(int a) : i(a) {}
};

int main()
{
    std::vector<ha> v{ ha{1}, ha{7}, ha{1} }; // initial vector

    // GOAL : make a vector of pointers to elements with i < 2
    std::vector<ha*> ph; // target vector
    filter_transform(v.begin(), v.end(), back_inserter(ph), 
        [](ha &arg) { return arg.i < 2 ? std::make_optional(&arg) : std::nullopt; });

    for (auto p : ph)
        std::cout << p->i << std::endl;

    return 0;
}

Note that I just implemented Rust's approach in C++ here.