Print man contents as help prompt of a C program

I plan to use pandoc to generate the man files from markdown for a very small C program.

I do not want to repeat myself and type the help prompt (command [ -h | --help ]) into the source code of the program.

Question

Q: Could I permanently include man content from a file at compile time of a C program?
OR
Q: Is there a way in C to print the contents of the installed man page to stdout?

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[WIP] Solution

Based on @KamilCuk's answer here's what i am doing:

In terminal:

file command.1  # OUTPUT --> command.1: troff or preprocessor input, ASCII text    xxd -i command.1 > command.hex  

Then in main.c

#include "command.hex"  printf("%s", command_1);  

This is almost exactly what I am looking for except

1. I need the hexed troff to be parsed before printing. Or parsed before hexing. I am not sure which to do / how to do that.
   • No, I do not want to call man and pipe the output.
2. I would prefer using a library + a macro to generate the hex but I am not sure how it's done.

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Clarifications

What I mean by help prompt:

• The output of git --help which prints to stdout
• NOT the output of git --help branch which opens the man for git-branch

However, please do share the latter too. It isn't what I want: my manual is very short; but I would be glad to learn an alternative if not the exact one I seek.

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Considerations I have noted:

1. man pages are not always installed to the same location
2. man pages may not be installed in some systems; or there may be no man program

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66989171/print-man-contents-as-help-prompt-of-a-c-program April 07, 2021 at 11:23PM