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[QUOTE="Guest, post: 3464390"]
What I am trying to do is implement a associative array to lookup data
based on a key in C.  This might simple to do in C++ or Perl but I'm
restricted to use C.  The size of the data for the table isn't too
large but too large to structure the code as a clean chain of if/else
or similar logic.  Also, the lookup key values can be large,
unpredictable and not well dispersed which doesn't suit itself to a
hash table.

OK so my current idea for implementing this is using an array of C
structures which gets initialized and contains all the relevant
information.  The array will be a module global variable used in the C
file which needs this functionality.  The array definition would look
something like the following:

struct ErrorLookupTable
   {
   long  DeviceErrorCode;
   char* ErrorString;
   };

#define TableSize 6

static struct ErrorLookupTable MyTable[ TableSize ] =
   {
      {     45, "Not enough memory" },
      {    -66, "File I/O error" },
      {  -2565, "Device locked" },
      {  32727, "Device not found" },
      { -32727, "Device not found" },
      {  65534, "Unknown device error" }
      //... LOTS more
   };

So I have implemented some prototype code based on this and it does
work to do lookups.  But what I was wondering is how portable is
this?  Is this legal C as defined by the standard to initialize an
array of structures in this way?  Is this going to work across
platforms? I hope you see my dilemma the code appears to work on my
system. But I don't know if it's guaranteed to work everywhere and how
portable the library functions I'm working on will be because of it?

Thanks. :)
[/QUOTE]

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