Ubuntu Manpage: printw, wprintw, mvprintw, mvwprintw, vwprintw, vw_printw - write formatted output to a curses window

Provided by: ncurses-doc_6.5+20250216-2_all

NAME

       printw, wprintw, mvprintw, mvwprintw, vwprintw, vw_printw - write formatted output to a curses window

SYNOPSIS

       #include <curses.h>

       int printw(const char *fmt, ...);
       int wprintw(WINDOW *win, const char *fmt, ...);
       int mvprintw(int y, int x, const char *fmt, ...);
       int mvwprintw(WINDOW *win, int y, int x, const char *fmt, ...);

       int vw_printw(WINDOW *win, const char *fmt, va_list varglist);

       /* obsolete */
       int vwprintw(WINDOW *win, const char *fmt, va_list varglist);

DESCRIPTION

       printw, wprintw, mvprintw, and mvwprintw are analogous to printf(3).  In effect, the string that would be
       output  by  printf(3) is instead output as though waddstr(3NCURSES) were used with win (or stdscr) as its
       first argument.

       vwprintw and vw_printw are analogous to vprintf(3), and perform a wprintw using a variable argument list.
       The third argument is a va_list, a pointer to a list of arguments, as defined in stdarg.h.

RETURN VALUE

       These functions return ERR upon failure and OK upon success.

       In ncurses, failure occurs if the library cannot allocate enough memory for the  buffer  into  which  the
       output is formatted, or if the window pointer win is null.

       Functions prefixed with “mv” first perform cursor movement and fail if the position (y, x) is outside the
       window boundaries.

NOTES

       No  wide  character  counterpart  functions  are  defined  by the “wide” ncurses configuration nor by any
       standard.  To format and write a wide-character string to a curses window, consider using swprintf(3) and
       waddwstr(3NCURSES) or similar.

PORTABILITY

       X/Open Curses Issue 4 describes these functions.  It specifies no error conditions for them.

       ncurses defines vw_printw and vwprintw identically to support legacy applications.  However,  the  latter
       is obsolete.

       •   X/Open Curses Issue 4 Version 2 (1996), marked vwprintw as requiring varargs.h and “TO BE WITHDRAWN”,
           and specified vw_printw using the stdarg.h interface.

       •   X/Open  Curses  Issue 5,  Draft 2 (December 2007) marked vwprintw (along with vwscanw and the termcap
           interface) as withdrawn.  After incorporating review comments,  this  became  X/Open  Curses  Issue 7
           (2009).

       •   ncurses provides vwprintw, but marks it as deprecated.

HISTORY

While printw was implemented in 4BSD (November 1980), it was unused until 4.2BSD (August 1983), which
employed it for games. That early version of curses preceded the ANSI C standard of 1989. It did not
use varargs.h, though that had been available since Seventh Edition Unix (1979). In 1991 (a couple of
years after SVr4 was generally available, and after the C standard was published), other developers
updated the library, using stdarg.h internally in 4.4BSD curses. Even with this improvement, BSD curses
did not use function prototypes (nor even declare functions) in curses.h until 1992.

SVr2 (1984) documented printw and wprintw tersely as “printf on stdscr” and “printf on win”,
respectively.

SVr3 (1987) added mvprintw and mvwprintw, with a three-line summary asserting that they were analogous to
printf(3), explaining that the string that printf(3) would write to the standard output stream would
instead be output using waddstr to the given window. SVr3 also implemented vwprintw, describing its
third parameter as a va_list, defined in varargs.h, and referred the reader to the manual pages for
varargs and vprintf for detailed descriptions.

SVr4 (1989) introduced no new variations of printw, but provided for using either varargs.h or stdarg.h
to define the va_list type.

X/Open Curses Issue 4 (1995), defined vw_printw to replace vwprintw, stating that its va_list type is
defined in stdarg.h.