Questions tagged [printf]

For detailed information on how the printf function works in C, refer to Open Group Base Specifications or the C standard.

C99 knows these members of the printf()-family:

  printf     vprintf     wprintf     vwprintf
 fprintf    vfprintf    fwprintf    vfwprintf
 sprintf    vsprintf    swprintf    vswprintf
snprintf   vsnprintf   snwprintf   vsnwprintf

POSIX additionally knows these:

 dprintf    vdprintf

GNU adds these:

asprintf   vasprintf

The name is generally of the form:

• optional v for va_list
• output specifier: None for stdout, f for FILE*, s for supplied buffer, sn for supplied buffer of specified length, as for allocated buffer, d for supplied file descriptor
• optional w for wide variant.
• printf

Documentation for printf function is available on Linux/Unix in section 3 of the manual and can be accessed by using man 3 printf.

For a multi-lingual description of the history of printing formatted strings across many languages, refer to Wikipedia article printf format string