Avoid trailing zeroes in printf()

Question

I keep stumbling on the format specifiers for the printf() family of functions. What I want is to be able to print a double (or float) with a maximum given number of digits

Answer 1

Some of the highly voted solutions suggest the %g conversion specifier of printf. This is wrong because there are cases where %g will produce scientific notation. Other solutions use math to print the desired number of decimal digits.

I think the easiest solution is to use sprintf with the %f conversion specifier and to manually remove trailing zeros and possibly a decimal point from the result. Here's a C99 solution:

#include 
#include 

char*
format_double(double d) {
    int size = snprintf(NULL, 0, "%.3f", d);
    char *str = malloc(size + 1);
    snprintf(str, size + 1, "%.3f", d);

    for (int i = size - 1, end = size; i >= 0; i--) {
        if (str[i] == '0') {
            if (end == i + 1) {
                end = i;
            }
        }
        else if (str[i] == '.') {
            if (end == i + 1) {
                end = i;
            }
            str[end] = '\0';
            break;
        }
    }

    return str;
}

Note that the characters used for digits and the decimal separator depend on the current locale. The code above assumes a C or US English locale.