C Primer Plus, Fourth Edition

Section VI—Extended Integer Types

As described in Chapter 3, “Data and C,” the C99 header file inttypes.h provides a systematic set of alternative names for the various integer types. These names describe the properties of the type more clearly than do the standard names. For example, type int might be 16 bits, 32 bits, or 64 bits, but the int32_t type always is 32 bits.

More precisely, the inttypes.h header file defines macros that can be used with scanf() and printf() to read and write integers of these types. This header file includes the stdlib.h header file, which provides the actual type definitions. The formatting macros are strings that can be concatenated with other strings to produce the proper formatting directions.

The types are defined ...