Why doesn't printf allow you to specifiy multiple format strings? [closed]

by

How would printf() know where the formatting strings ended and the actual values began? You’re not including any such information, which is the entire point of the formatting string: describing the variable number of arguments so the code inside printf() knows how many arguments to process.

And in what way is that better than

printf("%d%d", 2, 4);

?

Also, the printed result ("24", without newline) would be pretty hard to interpret in any way, so you’d might as well add spacing, which will help make the formatting string more readable:

printf("%d %d", 2, 4);

That will print "2 4" (again, without newline).

Note that in C, there’s no way for a variable-arguments function (printf() in this case) to somehow determine the amount (or types!) of its argument(s). It has to know, or be able to compute on its own based on some of the arguments (or some other state).

Also, if wanted to print "%s", I wonder how you imagine

printf("%s", "%s");

should work?

More Related Contents:

  1. Program is working on code block but not in hacker rank
  2. Why is this program not printing the input I provided? (C)
  3. How to write a binary integer to binary file | c [closed]
  4. Create your own toUpper and toLower in C [closed]
  5. What is the difference between a definition and a declaration?
  6. How do I base64 encode (decode) in C?
  7. Is this C implementation of Fisher-Yates shuffle correct?
  8. C skipping one command of a function? [duplicate]
  9. Difference between scanf and scanf_s
  10. Cholesky decomposition with OpenMP
  11. Does bit-shift depend on endianness?
  12. Why does stdout need explicit flushing when redirected to file?
  13. Does the size of pointers vary in C? [duplicate]
  14. What is the meaning of “wild pointer” in C?
  15. Does unaligned memory access always cause bus errors?
  16. Pass a two dimensional array to a function of constant parameter
  17. XML Parser for C [closed]
  18. Explain this implementation of malloc from the K&R book
  19. Need to know when no data appears between two token separators using strtok()
  20. How to get the current time in milliseconds from C in Linux?
  21. How can I avoid “duplicate symbol” errors in xcode with shared static libraries?
  22. C: How can I make it so scanf() input has one of two formats?
  23. How to define and work with an array of bits in C?
  24. How do I reimplement (or wrap) a syscall function on Linux?
  25. Memory map for a 2D array in C
  26. Terminate a process tree (C for Windows)
  27. Values obtained in case of a recursive function
  28. library not found for -lrt with QtCreator [mac os]
  29. working of fork in c language [closed]
  30. How do I get the file HANDLE from the fopen FILE structure?

Leave a Comment