'Duplicate case value' error with chars.

I want to give a variable a value according to the value of a char within a string.

For example, if (in[12] == z) y = 8;

So what I've done is assign some const chars, and I'm using a switch... case to assign the values. I keep getting 'duplicate case value' errors from the line with "case (V): y = 5; break;" onwards, and my compiler tells me that the case value was previously used in the previous line.

What am I doing wrong?

Code:

    
//...

    const char I = ('i'||'I');
    const char V = ('v'||'V');
    const char X = ('x'||'X');
    const char L = ('l'||'L');
    const char C = ('c'||'C');
    const char M = ('m'||'M');
    const char operators = ('/'||'*'||'+'||'-');

//...

for (i = 0, x = 0; i < 256, in[i] != '\0'; i++) 
        
        {
    
        if (in[i] != operators) {
                  switch (in[i]) {
                  
                         case (I): y = 1; break;
                         case (V): y = 5; break;
                         case (X): y = 10; break;
                         case (L): y = 50; break;
                         case (C): y = 100; break;
                         case (M): y = 1000; break;
                         default: cout<<"Oh ......... Something's gone wrong."; break;}

/* code to do something with y before the cycle starts again and it's changed */

        }

Yes, it's a roman numeral calculator .

> const char I = ('i'||'I');
This isn't what you think it is.
In particular, it isn't a value which specifically matches two cases of the same letter.

By the time you've done the same trick to several letters, you have duplicate values.

Scrap all the const chars, and do this

Code:

switch ( toupper(in[i]) ) {
  case 'I': y = 1; break;
  case 'V': y = 5; break;

Thanks a lot, I didn't know of toupper.

So what does "const char I = ('i'||'I');" do?

Is it possible to assign multiple characters to one char at all? I suppose you could create a char array and iterate through it, applying code to each element, but this would be pretty messy.

> So what does "const char I = ('i'||'I');" do?
Well it's a boolean expression, equivalent to

Code:

const char I = ( 'i' != 0 || 'I' != 0 );

Since it's a logical OR expression with lots of things which are true, all your constants have the value 1.

> Is it possible to assign multiple characters to one char at all?
Not really
You could do

Code:

if ( strchr( "Ii", in[i] ) != NULL )

to see if a char was in a particular set of chars, but you couldn't use that in a case statement.