Enumeration Types

The GLib type system provides fundamental types for enumeration and flags types. Enumerations types are collection of identifiers associated with a numeric value; flags types are like enumerations, but allow their values to be combined by bitwise or.

A registered enumeration or flags type associates a name and a nickname with each allowed value, and the methods g_enum_get_value_by_name(), g_enum_get_value_by_nick(), g_flags_get_value_by_name() and g_flags_get_value_by_nick() can look up values by their name or nickname.

When an enumeration or flags type is registered with the GLib type system, it can be used as value type for object properties, using g_param_spec_enum() or g_param_spec_flags().

GObject ships with a utility called glib-mkenums, that can construct suitable type registration functions from C enumeration definitions.

Example of how to get a string representation of an enum value:

GEnumClass *enum_class;
GEnumValue *enum_value;

enum_class = g_type_class_ref (EXAMPLE_TYPE_ENUM);
enum_value = g_enum_get_value (enum_class, EXAMPLE_ENUM_FOO);

g_print ("Name: %s\n", enum_value->value_name);

g_type_class_unref (enum_class);

Alternatively, you can use g_enum_to_string().