I'm using the Juce Framework that has a setColour method like so:
g.setColour (Colour (0xff2a2620));
I instead would like to write something like more readable like:
g.setColour (Colour (lovelyBrown));, 'mapping' 0xff2a2620 to 'lovelyBrown'.
The method's prototype is:
explicit Colour (uint32 argb) noexcept; where uint32 is:
/** A platform-independent 32-bit unsigned integer type. */
typedef unsigned int uint32;
Juce has nice readable colour names already such as:
const Colour Colours::tomato (0xffff6347);, using a method to find the colour given a name:
static JUCE_API Colour findColourForName (const String& colourName,
const Colour& defaultColour);
However, I don't want to modify or subclass their Colours class. I am wondering if there is a simpler way of 'mapping' 0xff2a2620 to 'lovelyBrown'?
Just as you say Juce provides...
const Colour Colours::tomato (0xffff6347);
...you can add colours of your own:
const Colour lovelyBrown (0xff2a2620);
If you want a function to map from colour names to values at runtime, an easy and robust way is:
std::map<std::string, Colour> colourMap;
colourMap["lovelyBrown"] = lovelyBrown;
// add more here...
A slightly faster alternative is to have a contiguous array or vector of sorted colour names and use lower_bound to search. If you're not sure how to do that, you probably shouldn't... ;-P. (You'd either need to trust yourself/others to keep the list sorted in the source code, or do a runtime sort before first use, so there's a bit more risk/hassle+delocalisation respectively).
Note:
enum class Colours is that when you use the contained colour names, they must be prefixed by Colours::, so there's a discrepancy with the Juce-provided colour names:
g.setColour (Colour (tomato)); // ok for provided colours
g.setColour (Colour (Colours::lovelyBrown)); // oops, one of yours
enum or enum class makes the colours a distinct type, which has subtle consequences: e.g. you can't just stream them a la cout << lovelyBrown without writing your own operator<<, you can't invert the red component a la lovelyBrown ^ 0xFF0000 etc. - again, these things can be done for the Juce-provided colours.