Is there anyway I can incorporate a pretty large text file (about 700KBs) into the program itself, so I don't have to ship the text files together in the application directory ? This is the first time I'm trying to do something like this, and I have no idea where to start from.
Help is greatly appreciated (:
Depending on the platform that you are on, you will more than likely be able to embed the file in a resource container of some kind.
If you are programming on the Windows platform, then you might want to look into resource files. You can find a basic intro here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/y3sk7e6b.aspx
With more detailed information here:
If you can figure out how to use a resource file, that would be the preferred method.
It wouldn't be hard to turn a text file into a file that can be compiled directly by your compiler. This might only work for small files - your compiler might have a limit on the size of a single string. If so, a tiny syntax change would make it an array of smaller strings that would work just fine.
You need to convert your file by adding a line at the top, enclosing each line within quotes, putting a newline character at the end of each line, escaping any quotes or backslashes in the text, and adding a semicolon at the end. You can write a program to do this, or it can easily be done in most editors.
This is my example document:
"Four score and seven years ago,"
can be found in the file c:\quotes\GettysburgAddress.txt
Convert it to:
static const char Text[] =
"This is my example document:\n"
"\"Four score and seven years ago,\"\n"
"can be found in the file c:\\quotes\\GettysburgAddress.txt\n"
;
This produces a variable Text which contains a single string with the entire contents of your file. It works because consecutive strings with nothing but whitespace between get concatenated into a single string.
Have a look at the xxd command and its -include option. You will get a buffer and a length variable in a C formatted file.