OEGetTag

Associates a text string tag with a corresponding unsigned integer tag. Because integer comparisons are often faster than character string comparisons, operations which require a potentially large number of data comparisons may benefit by using integer instead of string data. The OEGetTag functions serve to associate, store and retrieve string and integer tags.

const char *OEGetTag(unsigned int tag)

Retrieves a character string tag associated with an integer tag. If no string tag has been associated with the passed integer tag, a pointer to a null-terminated pointer character string is returned. The function should always return a non-zero pointer.

unsigned int OEGetTag(const std::string &tag)

Retrieves an integer tag associated with the character string stored in the STL string object. The first call to OEGetTag with a particular character string creates an association with an arbitrary unique integer, and returns the associated integer tag. Subsequent calls to OEGetTag with the same character string value return the associated integer tag. No guarantees are made regarding the allocation of integer values associated with character string values.

unsigned int OEGetTag(const char *tag)

Retrieves an integer tag associated with a constant character string. The first call to OEGetTag with a particular character string creates an association with an arbitrary unique integer, and returns the associated integer tag. Subsequent calls to OEGetTag with the same character string value return the associated integer tag. No guarantees are made regarding the allocation of integer values associated with character string values.