I have spent many many hours on the net and haven't seen any hard code that will read a text file to populate variables in my arduino program. I was encouraged by the help directed toward #include and the array so I searched even more but found no real code to put it into action. (Many thanks for the array which I will edit and use.) I have googled it in many different ways but when you put in "arduino read text file", all I get is how to "file write" or SD serial stuff.
In C++ and almost all other languages, there is a file read of some sort. It seems that with an arduino, you can read from an SD card after uploading but not a file before. Perhaps I am mistaken. This is a micro board, not a mini-computer. I guess that since the arduino isn't built for stand alone I/O there isn't any code for files like that ...or maybe no one cares about doing what I am trying to do and hasn't written any code to do it yet. I'm baffled.
If there isn't a tangable path to do what I am trying to do, I hope that someone will put me out of my misery.
In any case, thanks for the help.