Standard Library Functions

C's standard library contains many features and functions which we haven't seen.

We've seen many of printf's formatting capabilities, but not all. Besides format specifier characters for a few types we haven't seen, you can also control the width, precision, justification (left or right) and a few other attributes of printf's format conversions. (In their full complexity, printf formats are about as elaborate and powerful as FORTRAN format statements.)

A scanf function lets you do ``formatted input'' analogous to printf's formatted output. scanf reads from the standard input; a variant fscanf reads from a specified file pointer.

The sprintf and sscanf functions let you ``print'' and ``read'' to and from in-memory strings instead of files. We've seen that atoi lets you convert a numeric string into an integer; the inverse operation can be performed with sprintf:

	int i = 10;
	char str[10];
	sprintf(str, "%d", i);

We've used printf and fprintf to write formatted output, and getchar, getc, putchar, and putc to read and write characters. There are also functions gets, fgets, puts, and fputs for reading and writing lines (though we rarely need these, especially if we're using our own getline and maybe fgetline), and also fread and fwrite for reading or writing arbitrary numbers of characters.

It's possible to ``un-read'' a character, that is, to push it back on an input stream, with ungetc. (This is useful if you accidentally read one character too far, and would prefer that some other part of your program read that character instead.)

You can use the ftell, fseek, and rewind functions to jump around in files, performing random access (as opposed to sequential) I/O.

The feof and ferror functions will tell you whether you got EOF due to an actual end-of-file condition or due to a read error of some sort. You can clear errors and end-of-file conditions with clearerr.

You can open files in ``binary'' mode, or for simultaneous reading and writing. (These options involve extra characters appended to fopen's mode string: b for binary, + for read/write.)

There are several more string functions in <string.h>. A second set of string functions strncpy, strncat, and strncmp all accept a third argument telling them to stop after n characters if they haven't found the \0 marking the end of the string. A third set of ``mem'' functions, including memcpy and memcmp, operate on blocks of memory which aren't necessarily strings and where \0 is not treated as a terminator. The strchr and strrchr functions find characters in strings. There is a motley collection of ``span'' and ``scan'' functions, strspn, strcspn, and strpbrk, for searching out or skipping over sequences of characters all drawn from a specified set of characters. The strtok function aids in breaking up a string into words or ``tokens,'' much like our own getwords function.

The header file <ctype.h> contains several functions which let you classify and manipulate characters: check for letters or digits, convert between upper- and lower-case, etc.

A host of mathematical functions are defined in the header file <math.h>. (As we've mentioned, besides including <math.h>, you may on some Unix systems have to ask for a special library containing the math functions while compiling/linking.)

There's a random-number generator, rand, and a way to ``seed'' it, srand. rand returns integers from 0 up to RAND_MAX (where RAND_MAX is a constant #defined in <stdlib.h>). One way of getting random integers from 1 to n is to call

	(int)(rand() / (RAND_MAX + 1.0) * n) + 1

	rand() / (RAND_MAX / n + 1) + 1

	rand() % n + 1

Several functions let you interact with the operating system under which your program is running. The exit function returns control to the operating system immediately, terminating your program and returning an ``exit status.'' The getenv function allows you to read your operating system's or process's ``environment variables'' (if any). The system function allows you to invoke an operating-system command (i.e. another program) from within your program.

The qsort function allows you to sort an array (of any type); you supply a comparison function (via a function pointer) which knows how to compare two array elements, and qsort does the rest. The bsearch function allows you to search for elements in sorted arrays; it, too, operates in terms of a caller-supplied comparison function.

Several functions--time, asctime, gmtime, localtime, asctime, mktime, difftime, and strftime--allow you to determine the current date and time, print dates and times, and perform other date/time manipulations. For example, to print today's date in a program, you can write

	#include <time.h>

	time_t now;
	now = time((time_t *)NULL);
	printf("It's %.24s", ctime(&now));

The header file <stdarg.h> lets you manipulate variable-length function argument lists (such as the ones printf is called with). Additional members of the printf family of functions let you write your own functions which accept printf-like format specifiers and variable numbers of arguments but call on the standard printf to do most of the work.

There are facilities for dealing with multibyte and ``wide'' characters and strings, for use with multinational character sets.

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This page by Steve Summit // Copyright 1995-1997 // mail feedback