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cprintffputs
wesbos
wesbos

Reputation: 26317

When should I use fputs instead of fprintf?

What exactly is the difference between the two?

Upvotes: 45

Views: 78430

Answers (3)

leonbloy
leonbloy

Reputation: 76026

As have been pointed out by other commenters (and as it's obvious from the docs) the great difference is that printf allows formatting of arguments.

Perhaps you are asking if the functions are equivalent where no additional arguments are passed to printf()? Well, they are not.

   char * str;
   FILE * stream;
   ...
   fputs(str,stream);    // this is NOT the same as the following line
   fprintf(stream,str);  // this is probably wrong

The second is probably wrong, because the string argument to fprintf() is a still a formating string: if it has a '%' character it will be interpreted as a formatting specifier.

The functionally equivalent (but less direct/efficient/nice) form would be

   fprintf(stream,"%s", str);

Upvotes: 15

Sadique
Sadique

Reputation: 22841

fprintf does formatted output. That is, it reads and interprets a format string that you supply and writes to the output stream the results.

fputs simply writes the string you supply it to the indicated output stream.

fputs() doesn't have to parse the input string to figure out that all you want to do is print a string.fprintf() allows you to format at the time of outputting.

Upvotes: 47

salezica
salezica

Reputation: 77109

Uhm... ...puts() just writes a string, while printf() has a number of formatting facilities for several types of data.

fputs() http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/clibrary/cstdio/fputs/

fprintf() http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/clibrary/cstdio/fprintf/

Documentation is useful! Learn to read it, and you'll have a powerful tool on your side.

Upvotes: 5

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