Opposite of C preprocessor "stringification"

When using C preprocessor one can stringify macro argument like this: ``` #define TO_STRING(x) "a string with " #x ``` and so when used, the result is as follows: `TO_STRING(test)` will expand to: `"a string with test"` Is there any way to do the opposite? Get a string literal as an input argument and produce a C identifier? For example: `TO_IDENTIFIER("some_identifier")` would expand to: `some_identifier` Thank you for your answers. EDIT: For those wondering what do I need it for: I wanted to refer to nodes in a scene graph of my 3D engine by string identifiers but at the same time avoid comparing strings in tight loops. So I figured I'll write a simple tool that will run in pre-build step of compilation and search for predefined string - for example `ID("something")`. Then for every such token it would calculate CRC32 of the string between the parenthesis and generate a header file with #defines containing those numerical identifiers. For example for the string `"something"` it would be: `#define __CRC32ID_something 0x09DA31FB` Then, generated header file would be included by each cpp file using `ID(x)` macros. The `ID("something")` would of course expand to `__CRC32ID_something`, so in effect what the compiler would see are simple integer identifiers instead of human friendly strings. Of course now I'll simply settle for `ID(something)` but I thought that using quotes would make more sense - a programmer who doesn't know how the `ID` macro works can think that `something` without quotes is a C identifier when in reality such identifier doesn't exist at all.