Question

I need to store something in source as a char array so I can read it later,

how to store it in source file as char pointer and how to convert a binary file to char pointer?

I remember I saw some demo before that use this way to publish small demo without carry some small files, such as 5k or even 100k size of file.

Answer 1

I usually use a simple Perl/Ruby/Python script to convert binary data to C source code:

# Python script bin_to_c.py
import sys

i = 0
res = []
res.append("unsigned char data[] = \"")
for c in sys.stdin.read():
  if i % 15 == 0:
    res.append("\"\n    \"")
  res.append("\\x%02x" % ord(c))
  i += 1

print ''.join(res) + '";'
print "size_t data_size = sizeof(data) - 1;"

You can then paste the output into a C file, like this:

python bin_to_c.py < input.bin > data.c