On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 10:30 AM, Nadav Har'El <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 11, 2008, Dan Bar Dov wrote about "Help with printf": > >... > > But if I put the format in a variable (as opposed to a string literal), I > > find that > > escape processing does not occur. > >... > > and running (# is the prompt) > > # ./test "%s flowers\n" 7 > > > > give the output > > 7 flowers\n# > > What you call "escape processing", i.e., the conversion of the two > characters > "\n" into one newline character (ASCII code 10), isn't done by the printf > library function - rather it is done by the C compiler! > When the C compiler sees the character \ followed by n inside a string > constant, it translates it into a newline character. That explains it. > > The shell does not normally do this translation, which is why your "test" > program gets the characters \ and n, not a newline. I'm not using it from shell, that was just an example. I need to read format strings from file and use them to print stuff like error reports (the error includes only parameters, and the format string comes from a file. > > There are several ways you can fix this problem. The most obvious one is > to parse the string in the C code, and do the replacement of \n into a Is there a library function that does the "conversion" for me? Thanks
