C Academy · Lesson

Enum Values and Ranges

Control underlying integers.

Assigning Explicit Values

You are not stuck with the default 0, 1, 2 sequence. You can assign any integer to a name using =.

This is useful when the numbers must match an external system, like HTTP status codes.

enum Http { OK = 200, NOT_FOUND = 404, ERROR = 500 };

Once assigned, those exact numbers are what get stored and printed.

Here the enum names map directly to standard HTTP codes.

#include <stdio.h>
enum Http { OK = 200, NOT_FOUND = 404, ERROR = 500 };
int main(void) {
    printf("%d %d\n", OK, NOT_FOUND);
    return 0;
}