How to search for an element in an stl list?

You use std::find from <algorithm>, which works equally well for std::list and std::vector. std::vector does not have its own search/find function.

#include <list>
#include <algorithm>

int main()
{
    std::list<int> ilist;
    ilist.push_back(1);
    ilist.push_back(2);
    ilist.push_back(3);

    std::list<int>::iterator findIter = std::find(ilist.begin(), ilist.end(), 1);
}

Note that this works for built-in types like int as well as standard library types like std::string by default because they have operator== provided for them. If you are using using std::find on a container of a user-defined type, you should overload operator== to allow std::find to work properly – see EqualityComparable concept.