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strliteral

strliteral is a tool to embed data into C or C++ programs. It does this by generating string literals which contain the data you want to embed, which is orders of magnitude faster to compile than the character arrays generated by xxd -i.

For more info on performance and such, read this article: https://mort.coffee/home/fast-cpp-embeds/

strliteral has no dependencies outside of the stdlib, and should support any conforming C89 compiler or newer.

Usage

The basic syntax for strliteral is:

strliteral [options] [infile] [outfile]

if no outfile is provided, the default is stdout. If no infie is provided, the default is stdin.

The options are:

  • -h, --help: Show a help dialog
  • --no-const: Output mutable variables instead of consts
  • --always-escape: Always escape every byte with an octal escape, instead of only escaping "weird" characters. Useful in edge cases related to weird source and execution charsets.
  • -l, --line-length <length>: Set the number of characters in a string literal. Default: 100
  • -i, --ident <ident>: Set the identifier. Default: generate an identifier based on the infile name.

Incorporatng into a build system

Unless and until strliteral becomes a common package in distros, I would recommend bundling a copy of strliteral.c with your project, especially if it's open source. Here's an example GNU Makefile which can generate object files in build/static/ from files in static/:

build/static/%.o: build/static/%.c
	@mkdir -p $(@D)
	$(CC) -o $@ -c $<

build/static/%.c: static/% build/static/strliteral
	@mkdir -p $(@D)
	./build/static/strliteral $< $@

build/static/strliteral: strliteral.c
	@mkdir -p $(@D)
	$(CC) -O3 -o $@ $<