Question

I have the following file. I wrote a C++ program that copies and pastes it on another one (along with additional stuff). However, I want to get rid of it. That is, I do not want to distribute both an executable and this file. I tried hard-coding its contents, but it is tedious since there are special characters (like ", \n, etc.), and a string variable may not always have the necessary memory to hold all of that data.

What else can I do?

Answer 1

The first thing that I was going to suggest is to encode the content of the file. Automatically, of course. I could imagine a nightmare of typing that in. That being said, there is a variety of tools out there. For example, bin2h. Or, for instance, there is a Qt Resources framework that is indeed nice, but is probably not worth pulling in a dependency unless you already use Qt.

However, if the content of whatever you are trying to cope with is large enough that it does not fit into memory, you have no other way but stick with having that file distributed externally along with a program. In fact, this is a pretty common way of doing things. For example, most of the heavy-weight (and not only) applications for OS X (and iOS) are distributed as “bundles”, which is nothing but a zip compressed file with resource file(s) and executable(s). That as well might be a solution if you are targeting one of the platforms that promote such distribution practices.

Hope it helps 🙂