how about: std::advance(first, std::distance(first,last)-1) ?
The only requirement for distance() is that iterators be input iterators, which tokenizer's are.
This is an interesting solution. The downside is that the iterator would get advanced twice. I believe the implementation for distance for a forward iterator is to walk the iterator and count the distance. Then advance is going to do the same. This is efficient to type, but inefficient to run.
Of course. But with an iterator modelling only the forward_iterator concept, there isn't much choice. In fact the end() iterator can be just instantiated defaultly, as shown in a comment in the online docs. This indicates that it contains no information that could be used for traversal. You either have to copy the data out using the iterator or pay for the walking of it twice, like you said. So something like this would work, too: std::vectorstd::string v; std::copy(begin, end, std::back_inserter(v)); // use v[v.size()-1] here