Opposite of C preprocessor "stringification"
When using C preprocessor one can stringify macro argument like this:
#define TO_STRING(x) "a string with " #x
and so when used, the result is as follows:
TO_STRING(test)
will expand to: "a string with test"
Is there any way to do the opposite? Get a string literal as an input argument and produce a C identifier? For example:
TO_IDENTIFIER("some_identifier")
would expand to: some_identifier
Thank you for your answers.
EDIT: For those wondering what do I need it for:
I wanted to refer to nodes in a scene graph of my 3D engine by string identifiers but at the same time avoid comparing strings in tight loops. So I figured I'll write a simple tool that will run in pre-build step of compilation and search for predefined string - for example ID("something")
. Then for every such token it would calculate CRC32 of the string between the parenthesis and generate a header file with #defines containing those numerical identifiers. For example for the string "something"
it would be:
#define __CRC32ID_something 0x09DA31FB
Then, generated header file would be included by each cpp file using ID(x)
macros. The ID("something")
would of course expand to __CRC32ID_something
, so in effect what the compiler would see are simple integer identifiers instead of human friendly strings. Of course now I'll simply settle for ID(something)
but I thought that using quotes would make more sense - a programmer who doesn't know how the ID
macro works can think that something
without quotes is a C identifier when in reality such identifier doesn't exist at all.
No, you can't unstringify something.
//unstringify test
enum fruits{apple,pear};
#define IF_WS_COMPARE_SET_ENUM(x) if(ws.compare(L#x)==0)f_ret=x;
fruits enum_from_string(wstring ws)
{
fruits f_ret;
IF_WS_COMPARE_SET_ENUM(apple)
IF_WS_COMPARE_SET_ENUM(pear)
return f_ret;
}
void main()
{
fruits f;
f=enum_from_string(L"apple");
f=enum_from_string(L"pear");
}