Thread: I'd like to load a text file's contents cleanly at compile time

I'm making a simple console app, but I would like to proivde a nice-looking HTML help/tutorial file along with it. What I would like is that the user can specify a -h command line argument or something, and my program will write a "help.htm" file to the current directory, which is of course the aforementioned pretty-looking help file. It seems like I found someone with a similar problem:

http://cboard.cprogramming.com/showt...highlight=html

but I would hate to parse it manually like that and insert it into the program; that looks pretty dirty. It would be great if there's some mysterious concoction of preprocessing directives that gets me what I want. Or.. anything. Some kind of weird include/stringify mix? Any suggestions? Thanks

PS ooh and how about a binary file? Like if I wanted to write a jpg file also? That would be gravy on top of gravy, if anyone knows a way to do that.

Mmm - a text file to C code convertion is a few lines of perl

Code:

-- The perl program to do the magic
$ cat bar.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
while ( <> ) {
  chomp;s/\r//;
  s/([\\"])/\\$1/g;     # quote all backslashes and "
  print "\"$_\\n\"\n";
}

-- Example C program
$ cat bar.c
#include <stdio.h>
int main ( ) {
  printf(
#include "help.txt"
  );
  return 0;
}

-- The perl program run on itself
$ bar.pl bar.pl > help.txt

-- The file it produced, which is the C-string equivalent
$ cat help.txt
"#!/usr/bin/perl -w\n"
"use strict;\n"
"while ( <> ) {\n"
"  chomp;s/\\r//;\n"
"  s/([\\\\\"])/\\\\$1/g;     # quote all backslashes and \"\n"
"  print \"\\\"$_\\\\n\\\"\\n\";\n"
"}\n"

-- compile and test our program
-- voila, our original perl program!
$ gcc bar.c
$ ./a.exe
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
while ( <> ) {
  chomp;s/\r//;
  s/([\\"])/\\$1/g;     # quote all backslashes and "
  print "\"$_\\n\"\n";
}

Salem got the right idea; thanks. I wasn't saying that I didn't want to write the help file. I want to author the help file first in Wordpad (my usual HTML editing tool) and then have the "help.htm" file complete. Then I want my C program to write that "help.htm" file to the current directory upon request (-h flag), having stored all the text internally (I suppose even as a literal, as in Salem's code).

I don't know Perl, but I'm very familiar with PHP, so I can implement the same kind of thing in PHP. I should've thought of something like that before, but I guess I was hoping that some magicks native to the C language/preprocessor exist that did what I want. This looks like it'll work fine, though. Thanks