Exceptional C++ Style 40 New Engineering Puzzles, Programming Problems, and Solutions

Chapter 2. The String Formatters of Manor Farm, Part 1: sprintf

Difficulty: 3

In this Item and the next, an Orwellian look at the mysteries of sprintf and why the alternatives are always (yes, always) better.

JG Question

1. What is sprintf? Name as many standard alternatives to sprintf as you can.

Guru Question

1. What are the major strengths and weaknesses of sprintf? Be specific.

Solution

	“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
	--George Orwell, Animal Farm

1. What is sprintf? Name as many standard alternatives to sprintf as you can.

Consider the following C code that uses sprintf to convert an integer value to a human-readable string representation, perhaps for output on a report or in a GUI window:

// Example 2-1: Stringizing ...