Creating C formatted strings (not printing them)

Question

I have a function that accepts a string, that is:

void log_out(char *);

In calling it, I need to create a formatted string on the fly like:

Answer 1

It sounds to me like you want to be able to easily pass a string created using printf-style formatting to the function you already have that takes a simple string. You can create a wrapper function using stdarg.h facilities and vsnprintf() (which may not be readily available, depending on your compiler/platform):

#include 
#include 

// a function that accepts a string:

void foo( char* s);

// You'd like to call a function that takes a format string 
//  and then calls foo():

void foofmt( char* fmt, ...)
{
    char buf[100];     // this should really be sized appropriately
                       // possibly in response to a call to vsnprintf()
    va_list vl;
    va_start(vl, fmt);

    vsnprintf( buf, sizeof( buf), fmt, vl);

    va_end( vl);

    foo( buf);
}



int main()
{
    int val = 42;

    foofmt( "Some value: %d\n", val);
    return 0;
}

For platforms that don't provide a good implementation (or any implementation) of the snprintf() family of routines, I've successfully used a nearly public domain snprintf() from Holger Weiss.