Advanced Mac OS X Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

Formatted I/O

The printf family of calls lives under standard / buffered I/O because they write out to FILE streams, either explicitly or implicitly. sprintf and snprintf write to a buffer, but they have the same syntax as their I/O companions.

int printf (const char *format, ...);

int fprintf (FILE *stream, const char *format, ...);

int sprintf (char *str, const char *format, ...);

int snprintf (char *str, size_t size, const char *format, ...);

int asprintf (char **ret, const char *format, ...);

printf() writes to stdout. fprintf() writes to any FILE. sprintf() writes into a buffer, while snprintf() writes into a buffer but is given the amount of space it can write in. Always use snprintf() instead of sprintf(). There is no prevention of buffer ...