How is a enum stored?

[jyang72211]

Hi all,

I am kind of curious about how an enum is stored.  If I choose U8 for my enum, I know that I need at least 8 bits to store the number.  Where is the string portion of the enum stored?  And how is it stored?

I tried to do a U32 type cast on the U8 enum, and I found what I didn't expect.  I found that the original 8 bits became the MSB of the new 32 bits, instead of the LSB.  Why is that?  See attached. 

Yik

[Darin.K]

To get what you expect the Type Cast to do, convert the U8 to U32.  You told LV to look in memory where the U8 is stored and treat it as a U32,  the first 8 bits are as expected, the other 24 0's are just values from never-never land in memory.

[Ben]

In this thread Greg McKaskle talks about enums.

This explains how the type descriptor is formatted.

And this used to work for pulling out the strings.

Ben

[jyang72211]

Hi Ben,

Good information.  How do you get the type description information in hex from in LV? 

Yik

[Ben]

"Flatten to string" and choose (pop-up) the old version. The new thinks we don't need to know that anymore.

Ben

[nathand]

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Ben wrote:

"Flatten to string" and choose (pop-up) the old version. The new thinks we don't need to know that anymore.

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Fortunately we now have modern tools that can take an enum as an input and give us the list of strings: vi.lib\utility\VariantDataType\GetNumericInfo.vi