Format Specifiers

Format Specifiers in C language tells us which type of data to store and which type of data to print.This statement tells us that it is used in only 2 places

It performs following tasks

(1) Taking Input
(2)Displaying Output

Here is an example

int a=2;
 printf( ” %d “, x );

Output

2

Function printf of c language does not know what it has to print either it is and integer or float or long variable. What %d does is that it tells the function printf that it is an integer type variable.And a in function printf tells it to print the integer value from the variable named ‘a’.

Where % indicates conversion specification.

Format specifier	Characters matched	Argument type
%c	any single character	Char
%d, %i	Integer	integer type
%u	Integer	unsigned
%o	octal integer	unsigned
%x, %X	hex integer	unsigned
%e, %E, %f, %g, %G	floating point number	floating type
%p	address format	void *
%s	any sequence of non-whitespace characters	char

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Data type

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