Pad with asterisks in printf?

Question

I\'ve searched high and low, but in printf in C it seems that there\'s only zero fill and white space fill. I\'m looking to write my own fill, in this case using the asteris

Answer 1

Generate a string using snprintf, and then check it's length. For any characters that haven't been filled, output an asterik before printing the actual buffer that was filled by snprintf.

So for instance:

#define STRINGSIZE 8

char buffer[STRINGSIZE + 1];
int length = snprintf(buffer, sizeof(buffer), "%#.2f", floating_point_value);

for (int i = STRINGSIZE - length; i > 0; i--)
{
    printf("*");
}

printf("%s\n", buffer);