Format specifiers for definitive types

In one of my previous post, I mentioned about an ugly #ifdef workaround for printing definitive types like uint64_t. However this is not at all required :-). There is already format specifiers for these types in inttypes.h! It contains ARCH independent format specifiers for many definitive types like uint64_t, uint32_t, uint16_t etc.. and their signed counterparts too!

A quick glance around the header file is below! It is located in "/usr/include/inttypes.h"

/* Unsigned decimal notation.  */
# define SCNu8          "hhu"
# define SCNu16         "hu"
# define SCNu32         "u"
# define SCNu64         __PRI64_PREFIX "u"

and __PRI64_PREFIX is defined as

# if __WORDSIZE == 64
#  define __PRI64_PREFIX        "l"
#  define __PRIPTR_PREFIX       "l"
# else
#  define __PRI64_PREFIX        "ll"
#  define __PRIPTR_PREFIX
# endif


There are several such macros for many types and variants (hex, octal etc..). Glance through the header if you are interested further!

A quick short program.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <inttypes.h>

int main()
{
        uint64_t test = 0x12345678;
        printf("%"SCNu64" : %"SCNx64"\n", test, test);
}

Output: 305419896 : 12345678

and no warnings too ;-)