definition - What does "hard coded" mean?

Question

My assignment asks me to access a test.txt document, so the file name has to be hard coded to my C drive. I have no idea what hardcoding means. Can somebody please help me with this?

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
", 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.