Question

For example we have an Animal class ,and we created some other class such as Lion class,Tiger class,etc. I have made a list of the Animal class and I want to transverse the list and process the list according to the type of the class of the every member in the list.

Class Animal
Class Tiger :: public Animal{}
Class Lion :: public Animal{}
list<Animal> l;
Tiger T;
Lion L;
l.push_back(T); l.push_back(L);
if the top member of the list is Tiger print"ITs a tiger"
else print"something"

Simply, I want to check the type of the instance created. I don’t know how to do it.

Answer 1

This is called RTTI and it’s not good coding practice.

This being said, if you absolutely want to know a class’ type, you can do

if (typeid(myanimal) == typeid(Tiger)) {
    // Do something tiger-like
}

What I would recommend in your case is to have a common interface to all Animal, for instance a sayHello() method. You would have

class Animal {
    void sayHello() = 0;
    // Other things
}

In Tiger this would be

Tiger::sayHello() {
    cout << "Hello I'm a Tiger!" << endl;
}

Then, from your vector<Animal*> (you need to use pointers) just call

myAnimal->sayHello();