Is it possible to print a variable's type in standard C++?

Question

For example:

int a = 12;
cout << typeof(a) << endl;

Expected output:

int

Answer 1

The other answers involving RTTI (typeid) are probably what you want, as long as:

• you can afford the memory overhead (which can be considerable with some compilers)
• the class names your compiler returns are useful

The alternative, (similar to Greg Hewgill's answer), is to build a compile-time table of traits.

template  struct type_as_string;

// declare your Wibble type (probably with definition of Wibble)
template <>
struct type_as_string
{
    static const char* const value = "Wibble";
};

Be aware that if you wrap the declarations in a macro, you'll have trouble declaring names for template types taking more than one parameter (e.g. std::map), due to the comma.

To access the name of the type of a variable, all you need is

template 
const char* get_type_as_string(const T&)
{
    return type_as_string::value;
}