Programmatic way to get variable name in C?

Question

I am developing a tool to dump data from variables. I need to dump the variable name, and also the values.

My solution: Store variable name as a string, and print th

Answer 1

Shorter way:

#define GET_VARIABLE_NAME(Variable) (#Variable)

test:

#include <string>
class MyClass {};


int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
    int foo = 0;

    std::string var_name1 = GET_VARIABLE_NAME(foo);
     char* var_name2 = GET_VARIABLE_NAME(foo);
     char* var_name3 = GET_VARIABLE_NAME(MyClass);


    return 0;
}

Answer 2

If your executable is compiled with debugging information, you may be able to get this info. If not, you're probably out of luck. So you're building a debugger? Why? Existing debuggers for c are very mature. Why not use existing tools instead of re-inventing the wheel?

Answer 3

Despite the very precise answer from @Matt Joiner, I wanna write a full short code exemplifying this just to see how simple it is using #define macro

#include <stdio.h>
#define dump(v)printf("%s",#v);
int main()
    {
    char a;
    dump(a);
    }

output: a

Answer 4

You could try something like this:

#define DUMP(varname) fprintf(stderr, "%s = %x", #varname, varname);

I used to use this header I wrote, when I was new to C, it might contain some useful ideas. For example this would allow you to print a C value and provide the format specifier in one (as well as some additional information):

#define TRACE(fmt, var) \
        (error_at_line(0, 0, __FILE__, __LINE__, "%s : " fmt, #var, var))

If you're using C++, you could use the type of the passed value and output it appropriately. I can provide a much more lucrative example for how to "pretty print" variable values if this is the case.