What does "hard coded" mean?

Question

Hi guys. I gotta problem, it's just a lil one. I have like three assignments due tomorrow night but in order to do two of them, I have to be able to access a test.txt document from my IDE. To do that, the file has to be hard coded to my C drive. I have no idea how to do this. Can somebody please help me with this? I would really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

LilProblems

Answer 1

"hard coding" means putting something into your source code. If you are not hard coding, then you do something like prompting the user for the data, or allow the user to put the data on the command line, or something like that.

So, to hard code the location of the file as being on the C: drive, you would just put the pathname of the file all together in your source code.

Here is an example.

int main()
{
    const char *filename = "C:\\myfile.txt";

    printf("Filename is: %s\n", filename);
}

The file name is "hard coded" as: C:\myfile.txt

The reason the backslash is doubled is because backslashes are special in C strings.