Question

Is there a way to include an entire text file as a string in a C program at compile-time?

something like:

• file.txt:

  This is a little text file 

• main.c:

  #include <stdio.h> int main(void) {    #blackmagicinclude('file.txt', content)    /*    equiv: char[] content = 'This is\na little\ntext file';    */    printf('%s', content); } 

obtaining a little program that prints on stdout ‘This is a little text file’

At the moment I used an hackish python script, but it’s butt-ugly and limited to only one variable name, can you tell me another way to do it?

Answer 1

I’d suggest using (unix util)xxd for this. you can use it like so

$ echo hello world > a $ xxd -i a 

outputs:

unsigned char a[] = {   0x68, 0x65, 0x6c, 0x6c, 0x6f, 0x20, 0x77, 0x6f, 0x72, 0x6c, 0x64, 0x0a }; unsigned int a_len = 12;