Print text instead of value from C enum

Question

int main()
{

  enum Days{Sunday,Monday,Tuesday,Wednesday,Thursday,Friday,Saturday};

  Days TheDay;

  int j = 0;

  printf("Please enter the day of the week (0 to 6)\n");

  scanf("%d",&j);

  TheDay = Days(j);

  //how to PRINT THE VALUES stored in TheDay

  printf("%s",TheDay);  //   isnt working

  return 0;
}

Answer 1

Enumerations in C are numbers that have convenient names inside your code. They are not strings, and the names assigned to them in the source code are not compiled into your program, and so they are not accessible at runtime.

The only way to get what you want is to write a function yourself that translates the enumeration value into a string. E.g. (assuming here that you move the declaration of enum Days outside of main):

const char* getDayName(enum Days day) 
{
   switch (day) 
   {
      case Sunday: return "Sunday";
      case Monday: return "Monday";
      /* etc... */
   }
}

/* Then, later in main: */
printf("%s", getDayName(TheDay));

Alternatively, you could use an array as a map, e.g.

const char* dayNames[] = {"Sunday", "Monday", "Tuesday", /* ... etc ... */ };

/* ... */

printf("%s", dayNames[TheDay]);

But here you would probably want to assign Sunday = 0 in the enumeration to be safe... I'm not sure if the C standard requires compilers to begin enumerations from 0, although most do (I'm sure someone will comment to confirm or deny this).