Passing va_list to other functions

Question

I have been trying to pass variable arguments to other function in C but it is producing inconsistent result in different runtime environment as well as in different runs in sam

Answer 1

You cannot pass the variadic arguments to a variadic function. Instead, you must call a function that takes a va_list as argument. The standard library provides variants of printf and scanf that take a va_list; their names have the prefix v.

Your example should look like:

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdarg.h>

int printfln(const char *format, ...)
{
    int result;
    va_list args;

    va_start(args, format);
    result = vprintf(format, args);
    printf("\n");
    va_end(args);

    return result;
}

int main()
{
    int result = printfln("Something \n %d", 9);

    printf("(%d)\n", result);

    return 0;
}

There are some gotchas, for example when you want to call two v... function for printing to the screen and a log file: The v... function may exhaust the va_list, so you must pass in a fresh one to each call if your code should be portable.