printf's name comes from print formatted. It generates output under the control of a format string (its first argument) which consists of literal characters to be printed and also special character sequences--format specifiers--which request that other arguments be fetched, formatted, and inserted into the string. Our very first program was nothing more than a call to printf, printing a constant string:
printf("Hello, world!\n");
Our second program also featured a call to printf:
printf("i is %d\n", i);
In that case, whenever printf
``printed''
the string
"i is %d",
it did not print it verbatim;
it replaced the two characters %d with the value of the
variable i.
There are quite a number of format specifiers for printf.
Here are the
basic
ones
:
%d print an int argument in decimal %ld print a long int argument in decimal %c print a character %s print a string %f print a float or double argument %e same as %f, but use exponential notation %g use %e or %f, whichever is better %o print an int argument in octal (base 8) %x print an int argument in hexadecimal (base 16) %% print a single %
To illustrate with a few more examples: the call
printf("%c %d %f %e %s %d%%\n", '1', 2, 3.14, 56000000., "eight", 9);
would print
1 2 3.140000 5.600000e+07 eight 9%The call
printf("%d %o %x\n", 100, 100, 100);
would print
100 144 64Successive calls to printf just build up the output a piece at a time, so the calls
printf("Hello, ");
printf("world!\n");
would also print Hello, world!
(on one line of output).
Earlier we learned that C represents characters internally as small integers corresponding to the characters' values in the machine's character set (typically ASCII). This means that there isn't really much difference between a character and an integer in C; most of the difference is in whether we choose to interpret an integer as an integer or a character. printf is one place where we get to make that choice: %d prints an integer value as a string of digits representing its decimal value, while %c prints the character corresponding to a character set value. So the lines
char c = 'A';
int i = 97;
printf("c = %c, i = %d\n", c, i);
would print c as the character A and i as the number 97.
But if, on the other hand, we called
printf("c = %d, i = %c\n", c, i);
we'd see the decimal value (printed by %d) of the character
'A', followed by the character (whatever it is) which happens
to have the decimal value 97.
You have to be careful when calling printf. It has no way of knowing how many arguments you've passed it or what their types are other than by looking for the format specifiers in the format string. If there are more format specifiers (that is, more % signs) than there are arguments, or if the arguments have the wrong types for the format specifiers, printf can misbehave badly, often printing nonsense numbers or (even worse) numbers which mislead you into thinking that some other part of your program is broken.
Because of some automatic conversion rules which we haven't covered yet, you have a small amount of latitude in the types of the expressions you pass as arguments to printf. The argument for %c may be of type char or int, and the argument for %d may be of type char or int. The string argument for %s may be a string constant, an array of characters, or a pointer to some characters (though we haven't really covered strings or pointers yet). Finally, the arguments corresponding to %e, %f, and %g may be of types float or double. But other combinations do not work reliably: %d will not print a long int or a float or a double; %ld will not print an int; %e, %f, and %g will not print an int.
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This page by Steve Summit // Copyright 1995-1997 // mail feedback