ComboBox question

["David Conley (FRD)" <dconley frd co uk>]

I've got a combobox created that has lots of text entries in it. I would 
like to at some point during the program cycle select one of these 
entries. I do not have the id number of the item only the text value of 
the entry. I'd expect to have to loop through the list and do a string 
compare on the string I want to find compared to the currently iterated 
item. Problem is I don't know how to iterate through a combobox and return 
the current value string. I'm using C++ and the latest version of GTK if 
that helps
Cheers
Dave