Thread: Printing values from Enum

I've been struggling with this for some time now. I searched the previous posts and I couldn't find an answer.

Consider the following.

Code:

enum meat {beef, pork, chicken, salmon };

Now

Code:

printf("%d", beef);

Will print 0. Is there anyway to use the value 0 to print "beef"?

AFAIK I don't think so since those symbolic names don't exist at runtime.

Is there anyway to use the value 0 to print "beef"?

Not in this case, but you may switch to string arrays to obtain the desired behaviour.

If you need to start at a different value than 0, add an offset. If the integer values don't increase by 1, build your own structure for storing the stuff:

Code:

typedef struct {
        int index;
        char buf[1024];
} kv;

kv stuff[1024];

// ...

stuff[0].index = 17;
strcpy(stuff[0].buf, "snafu");

Greets,
Philip

Thanks for the replies. The exercises from the enum/typdef chapter in my C book asked for a lot of enum value printing. Consequently, this chapter is before the array chapter so it took a lot of switch statements.

Oh and thanks MK27. I'm picking up C in jail, Sonia says its good for me.