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Document number: N3716p>

Date: 2013-08-18

A printf-like Interface for the Streams Library (revision 1)

by Zhihao Yuan

Excerpt:

Changes since N3506

• Support Boost.Format’s simple positional syntax (%1%, %2% ...).
• Cover the cornor cases “not-mentioned” by the C standard.
• Mention the function style syntax suggested by BSI in “Future Issues”.

Overview

cout << putf("hello, %s\n", "world");

Printf defines the most widely used syntax to format a text output. It exists in C, Perl, Python and even Java™, and is available from Qt to Boost.Format[1], but not C++ standard library. This proposal tries to define such an interface based on the printf function defined by C[2] for the C++ I/O streams library, with the error handling policy and the type safety considered.