CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c
user3109599
user3109599

Reputation: 15

simple C error - #include?

I'm using textpad on Windows 8, installed MinGW for compiling C

Not sure why this is causing trouble:

#include <stdio.h>

int main (void)
{
    printf("To C, or not to C: that is the question.\n");
    return 0;
}

The error says

C:\Users\Admin\Desktop\C files\pun.c:1:2: warning: null character(s) ignored [enabled by default]
 #
  ^
C:\Users\Admin\Desktop\C files\pun.c:1:3: error: invalid preprocessing directive #i
 #
   ^

cc1.exe: out of memory allocating 838860800 bytes

Tool completed with exit code 1

Upvotes: 0

Views: 491

Answers (1)

paxdiablo
paxdiablo

Reputation: 881113

You've almost certainly saved your file with one of the Unicode encodings such as UTF-16.

This assigns 16 bits to each character meaning that if you hes-dump your code, you'll see something like:

0000 - 23 00 69 00 6e 00 63 00 - 6c 00 75 00 64 00 5 00 - #.i.n.c.l.u.d.e.

at the start.

A compiler that doesn't understand UTF-16 will then probably complain bitterly about finding null bytes amongst all the real characters, just as yours seems to have done.

To fix it, either save the file in a more conventional form (such as ASCII) or find a compiler that can handle it. The former is probably the easier path to take provided you don't actually need all those non-ASCII Unicode characters.

Upvotes: 3

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