How to convert an enum type variable to a string?

ghz 1years ago ⋅ 9976 views

Question

How to make printf to show the values of variables which are of an enum type? For instance:

typedef enum {Linux, Apple, Windows} OS_type; 
OS_type myOS = Linux;

and what I need is something like

printenum(OS_type, "My OS is %s", myOS);

which must show a string "Linux", not an integer.

I suppose, first I have to create a value-indexed array of strings. But I don't know if that is the most beautiful way to do it. Is it possible at all?

Answer

There really is no beautiful way of doing this. Just set up an array of strings indexed by the enum.

If you do a lot of output, you can define an operator<< that takes an enum parameter and does the lookup for you.

#c