Question

Question should say it all.

Let’s say there’s a local file “mydefaultvalues.txt”, separated from the main project. In the main project I want to have something like this:

 char * defaultvalues = " ... "; // here should be the contents of mydefaultvalues.txt

And let the compiler swap " ... " with the actual contents of mydefaultvalues.txt. Can this be done? Is there like a compiler directive or something?

Answer 1

One way to achieve compile-time trickery like this is to write a simple script in some interpreted programming language(e.g. Python, Ruby or Perl will do great) which does a simple search and replace. Then just run the script before compiling.

Define your own #pramga XYZ directive which the script looks for and replaces it with the code that declares the variable with file contents in a string.

char * defaultvalues = ...

where … contains the text string read from the given text file. Be sure to compensate for line length, new lines, string formatting characters and other special characters.

Edit: lvella beat me to it with far superior approach – embrace the tools your environment supplies you. In this case a tool which does string search and replace and feed a file to it.