如何访问指针结构中的字符串？

Question

I have a structure:

struct dispPara
{   
    char *english,   
    char *french,
    void            *value;             
    unsigned char    type;          
    unsigned char    units;                 
};

and

struct dispPara dispParas[5] =
{

 {"abc_english", "xyz_frnch", &blah, blah, blah},

 {"english",  "frnch", &blah, blah, blah},

}

I am accessing english string with: dispParas[i].english. Now, default is english string and if someone changes language to french, pointer should be printing french. how can I access french string with a pointer?

Thank you.

Answer 1

It is not clear what you actually want. But if it is for internationalisation, you do it the wrong way, as you cannot index into a struct .

Instead, You should use a const char *[] per language (with all strings) and a const char ** which points to the array for the current language. The string would then be current_language[text_index] .

The arrays have to have the same meaning at the same index, of course. To be more clearly you should use an enum for each text instead of a numerical index:

const char *text_english[] = { "Hello", "World" };
const char *text_german[] = { "Hallo", "Welt" };

typedef enum {
    TEXT_HELLO = 0,
    TEXT_WORLD,
} TextCodes;

const char **current_language = text_english;

...

int main(void)
{
    printf("%s %s!", current_language[TEXT_HELLO], current_language[TEXT_WORLD]);
}

An alternative way would be to use a 2D array:

#define NUM_LANGUAGES 2

const char *text_strings[][NUM_LANGUAGES] = {
    { "Hello", "Hallo", },
    { "World", "Welt", },
};

...

size_t lang = 1; // german
printf("%s %s", text_strings[0][lang], text_strings[1][lang]);

The enums above can be used the same way. Problem here is that adding a new language will require to change the whole array instead of just adding a new one.