[igraph] question about vertex names

[Qunawei Zhang]

Hello:

I have input my gene interaction network with the gene symbol as an attribute, now I want to calculate the shortest paths between some important genes in the network.

I am using the "igraph_shortest_paths()" function, and I noticed that the "from" and "to" should be vertex ids. Is there some way to use the gene symbol list instead of their ids? That will be much more convenient.  

I had tried that in "R", it works when I provided the gene symbols to "from" and "to". But how can I use gene symbols in a c codes? I think there must be some way to use vertex names instead of ids, which works for all the c functions. 

Thanks

Best

Quanwie