printf ( ) function:

Data is displayed from the computer onto a standard output device using the library function printf ( ). Its main purpose is to display data from the computer’s memory to the standard output device in a specified format. It also falls under the category of formatted I/O functions.

            printf ( ) can be used to display any combination of output such as numerical value’s single characters and strings. It is almost similar to that of scanf ( ) except that its purpose is to display data rather than to enter data into computer.

General Syntax is:

                        printf (formatstring, arg1, arg2,…….., argn);

The formatstring is a string that contains the required formatting information. It consists of one or more character groups where each character group is used for each data item to be entered.

The various conversion characters that can be used are:

  d – Displays an integer in decimal form.

  e – Displays a floating point number in exponential form.

  f - Displays a floating point number in fixed decimal format i.e without an exponenet.

The arguments arg1, arg2,……., argn are the arguments that represent the individual data items. They can be single variable, array names or expression. Unlike scanf ( ), the arguments in

printf ( ) are not preceded by ampersands (&). This is because they don’t represent memory address.

To Know the use of printf ( ) let us consider a program.

#include<stdio.h>

#include<conio.h>

void main()

{

int age;

printf(“\n Enter your age :”);

scanf(“%d”,&age); 

printf(“\n I live in America “);

printf(“\n I am %d years old”,age);

getch();

}

Output:

Enter your age : 17

I live in America

I am 17 years old

The printf ( ) function examines the format string from left to right.

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