Where do I find the current C or C++ standard documents?

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PDF versions of the standard

As of 1st September 2014 March 2022, the best locations by price for the official C and C++ standards documents in PDF seem to be:

Non-PDF electronic versions of the standard

Warning: most copies of standard drafts are published in PDF format, and errors may have been introduced if the text/HTML was transcribed or automatically generated from the PDF.

(The site hosting the plain text version of the C++11 working draft also has some C++14 drafts in this format. But none of them are copies of the final working draft, N4140.)

Print versions of the standard

Print copies of the standards are available from national standards bodies and ISO but are very expensive.

If you want a hardcopy of the C90 standard for much less money than above, you may be able to find a cheap used copy of Herb Schildt‘s book The Annotated ANSI Standard at Amazon, which contains the actual text of the standard (useful) and commentary on the standard (less useful – it contains several dangerous and misleading errors).

The C99 and C++03 standards are available in book form from Wiley and the BSI (British Standards Institute):

Standards committee draft versions (free)

The working drafts for future standards are often available from the committee websites:

If you want to get drafts from the current or earlier C/C++ standards, there are some available for free on the internet:

For C:

For C++:

Note that these documents are not the same as the standard, though the versions just prior to the meetings that decide on a standard are usually very close to what is in the final standard. The FCD (Final Committee Draft) versions are password protected; you need to be on the standards committee to get them.

Even though the draft versions might be very close to the final ratified versions of the standards, some of this post’s editors would strongly advise you to get a copy of the actual documents — especially if you’re planning on quoting them as references. Of course, starving students should go ahead and use the drafts if strapped for cash.

It appears that, if you are willing and able to wait a few months after ratification of a standard, to search for “INCITS/ISO/IEC” instead of “ISO/IEC” when looking for a standard is the key. By doing so, one of this post’s editors was able to find the C11 and C++11 standards at reasonable prices. For example, if you search for “INCITS/ISO/IEC 9899:2011” instead of “ISO/IEC 9899:2011” on webstore.ansi.org you will find the reasonably priced PDF version.

The site https://wg21.link/ provides short-URL links to the C++ current working draft and draft standards, and committee papers:

The current draft of the standard is maintained as LaTeX sources on Github. These sources can be converted to HTML using cxxdraft-htmlgen. The following sites maintain HTML pages so generated:

Tim Song also maintains generated HTML and PDF versions of the Networking TS and Ranges TS.

POSIX extensions to the C standard

The POSIX standard (IEEE 1003.1) requires a compliant operating system to include a C compiler. This compiler must in turn be compliant with the C standard, and must also support various extensions defined in the “System Interfaces” section of POSIX (such as the off_t data type, the <aio.h> header, the clock_gettime() function and the _POSIX_C_SOURCE macro.)

So if you’ve tried to look up a particular function, been informed “This function is part of POSIX, not the C standard”, and wondered why an operating system standard was mandating compiler features and language extensions… now you know!

  • There is a draft version of POSIX.1-2008 at http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/open/n4217.pdf.

    POSIX.1-2008 also had two technical corrigenda, the latter of the two being dated 2016. There is an online HTML version of the standard incorporating the corrigenda at https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799.2016edition/ – though, again, I have had situations where the site’s own search box wasn’t good for finding information.

  • There is an online HTML version of POSIX.1-2017 at https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/ – though, again, I recommend using Google instead of that site’s searchbox. According to the Open Group website “IEEE 1003.1-2017 … is a revision to the 1003.1-2008 standard to rollup the standard including its two technical corrigenda (as-is)”. Linux manpages describe it as “technically identical” to POSIX.1-2008 with Technical Corrigenda 1 and 2 applied. This is therefore not a major revision and does not change the value of the _POSIX_C_SOURCE macro.

More Related Contents:

  1. What are the rules about using an underscore in a C++ identifier?
  2. What is the proper declaration of main in C++?
  3. What are the new features in C++17?
  4. Where and why do I have to put the “template” and “typename” keywords?
  5. What is this weird colon-member (” : “) syntax in the constructor?
  6. What are rvalues, lvalues, xvalues, glvalues, and prvalues?
  7. How come a non-const reference cannot bind to a temporary object?
  8. C++ delete – It deletes my objects but I can still access the data?
  9. How to stop C++ console application from exiting immediately?
  10. What is external linkage and internal linkage?
  11. Which kind of pointer do I use when?
  12. Why aren’t my include guards preventing recursive inclusion and multiple symbol definitions?
  13. Why is enum class preferred over plain enum?
  14. What is the point of function pointers?
  15. Is the practice of returning a C++ reference variable evil?
  16. Lifetime of temporaries
  17. Why will std::sort crash if the comparison function is not as operator
  18. What are template deduction guides and when should we use them?
  19. Deprecation of the static keyword… no more?
  20. Why is ‘this’ a pointer and not a reference?
  21. Template specialization of particular members?
  22. What are the advantages of using nullptr?
  23. Are all integer values perfectly represented as doubles? [duplicate]
  24. Why would one replace default new and delete operators?
  25. Why do compilers allow string literals not to be const?
  26. Why don’t the C or C++ standards explicitly define char as signed or unsigned?
  27. Why the sizeof(bool) is not defined to be one, by the Standard itself?
  28. is it ok to specialize std::numeric_limits for user-defined number-like classes?
  29. Conversion from Derived** to Base**
  30. Can we apply content not explicitly cited from the normative references to the C++ standard?

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