Is there any way to loop through a struct with elements of different types in C?
I'm not sure what you want to achieve, but you can use X-Macros and have the preprocessor doing the iteration over all the fields of a structure:
//--- first describe the structure, the fields, their types and how to print them
#define X_FIELDS \
X(int, field1, "%d") \
X(int, field2, "%d") \
X(char, field3, "%c") \
X(char *, field4, "%s")
//--- define the structure, the X macro will be expanded once per field
typedef struct {
#define X(type, name, format) type name;
X_FIELDS
#undef X
} mystruct;
void iterate(mystruct *aStruct)
{
//--- "iterate" over all the fields of the structure
#define X(type, name, format) \
printf("mystruct.%s is "format"\n", #name, aStruct->name);
X_FIELDS
#undef X
}
//--- demonstrate
int main(int ac, char**av)
{
mystruct a = { 0, 1, 'a', "hello"};
iterate(&a);
return 0;
}
This will print :
mystruct.field1 is 0
mystruct.field2 is 1
mystruct.field3 is a
mystruct.field4 is hello
You can also add the name of the function to be invoked in the X_FIELDS...
There is no safe way to enumerate a struct's members, unless the exact contents of the struct is known, and even in that case you have to be careful of things like struct alignment/padding.
Depending on your problem, it might be safer to have an array of your struct.