preprocessor file inclusion?

Hi,

It's been a while since I have coded anything in C, can't remember anything. Anyway, I was hoping to be able to include a file at compile time. This is for an embedded application and I don't have a file system. I was hoping I could do something simple like:

Code:

---

#define start_file
#include "filename"
#define end_file

---

But my compiler keeps trying to interpret the file as a header file. I would like to use the start_file as a pointer to the beginning of the file content. I am really hoping this is a simple question with a simple answer. Thanks in advance for any help.

Cheers,
Dyl

The C preprocessor is basically a big "copy and paste" machine, so what happens in this case is the same as if you took your source file and opened "filename" and copied the whole content, then pasted it into the source file before compiling the code. If "filename" doesn't contain C source code, it basically won't work to do this.

What are you actually trying to achieve, what is the content of the file you want to "include"?

--
Mats

Ya, that's what I figured. I want to have a pointer to the content of that file, which is binary.

So...

char * = <content of file>

At the preprocessor level, since I can't do that while running. I just want a static array of data.

Dyl

So the usual way to do that is to write a piece of code that turns your binary data into a char-array style initializer. So if your binary data is (in hex) 00112233, it would generate

Code:

---

0x00, 0x11, 0x22, 0x33

---

and then you'd do something like:

Code:

---

char *binary_data =
{
#include "myfile.data.h"
}

---

It's really just a 5-10 line program to convert the data.
To make it nicely readable [if it's a large amount of data], you may want to add a line-break every 10-16 byte or so.

--
Mats

Right on Mat! Thanks.

Cheers,
Dyl