Calling a bunch of text by a keyword

[jsmithy]

Hey guys,
I just started programming with C and I was wondering if its possible to call a bunch of text instead of repeating the printf commands.
For example I want to display the following banner (which reads "data storage system" made up of the # characters sorry it looks all messy lol) different areas of the program, but i dont want to keep copying and pasting coz it takes up so many lines.... is there a way to store it and give it a name then call the name when ever i need the banner to be displayed.
Sorry if it doesn't make any sense just new to this programming business lol
Thanks in advance

		printf("*******************************************************************************\n");
		printf("*                                                                             *\n");
		printf("* ##       #           ##  #                           ##          #          *\n");
		printf("* # #  ## ###  ##     #   ### ### ###  ## ### ###     #   # #  ## ### ### ### *\n");
		printf("* # # # #  #  # #      #   #  # # #   # # # # ##       #  ###  #   #  ##  ### *\n");
		printf("* # # ###  ## ###       #  ## ### #   ###  ## ###       #   # ##   ## ### # # *\n");
		printf("* ##                  ##                  ###         ##  ###                 *\n");
		printf("*                                                                             *\n");
		printf("*******************************************************************************\n");

[DeadPlanet]

You could use a character array or a pointer to store the string, then pass the array/pointer to printf to print.

The main differences that you need to know about, are:
1) Arrays are a lot easier for a beginner.
2) If you assign a string literal to a pointer then the string is read only.

If you don't want to modify the string you could use either a pointer to the string or an array, considering their relative ease of use I'd go with arrays.

There are a bunch of array tutorials around the net, just google "C Arrays" and you should strike gold.

It's also possible to do this using #define directives, but that's poor programming practice, so I'd recommend against that.

[quzah]

"calling a bunch of text by a keywords" sounds very much like "calling a function". Wrap it all up in a function, call it when you need it.


Quzah.

[jsmithy]

WOW thanks for the rapid responses guys, i think i might try out Quzah's method.
Cheers