Re: How to elegantly get the enum code from its string type

From:

James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.c++

Date:

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 16:04:26 -0700 (PDT)

Message-ID:

<ca439bf4-1040-49e4-a0a5-201b11967063@x12g2000yqx.googlegroups.com>

On Apr 13, 10:53 am, thomas <freshtho...@gmail.com> wrote:

      I got a problem in practice, and I cannot find a verly elegant
solution to it.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
enum Type{
       REPLY = 100,
       REP = 1052,
       HAHA = 9523,};
------------------------------------------------------------------------

When I open the interface to users for configuration, I would
like the user to use "REPLY", "REP", "HAHA" like string format
because it's much easier to recognize and remember.

But in my program, I need to use the actual code (integral format).

My solution is to define a map<string, int>, and insert the
string and integral format pairs into the map for query. But
it's really anoying and difficult to use, especially when
initializing.

That should be map<string, Type>. But in practice, a map is
often overkill. I generally use a simple C style array of
struct { char const*; Type}, and linear search. Which has the
advantage (not always important) that I can use it in
constructors of static objects, since the array is statically
initialized.

As for generating the array, it's fairly easy to parse the C++
code (ignoring everything but enums:-)) to generate the static
tables.

--
James Kanze