looping through enum values

Question

Is it possible to loop through enum values in Objective-C?

Answer 1

Given

enum Foo {Bar=0,Baz,...,Last}; 

you can iterate the elements like:

for(int i=Bar; i<=Last; i++) {   ... } 

Note that this exposes the really-just-an-int nature of a C enum. In particular, you can see that a C enum doesn't really provide type safety, as you can use an int in place of an enum value and vice versa. In addition, this depends on the declaration order of the enum values: fragile to say the least. In addition, please see Chuck's comment; if the enum items are non-contiguous (e.g. because you specified explicit, non-sequential values for some items), this won't work at all. Yikes.

Answer 2

If you enum is defined as follows:

enum Direction {  East,  West,  North,  South}; 

You can loop through it this way:

for ( int direction = East; direction <= South; ++direction) {    /* Do something with Direction }