C Language Conversion Characters

C All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies

When programming in C, you use conversion characters — the percent sign and a letter, for the most part — as placeholders for variables you want to display. The following table shows the conversion characters and what they display:

Conversion Character	Displays Argument (Variable’s Contents) As
%c	Single character
%d	Signed decimal integer (int)
%e	Signed floating-point value in E notation
%f	Signed floating-point value (float)
%g	Signed value in %e or %f format, whichever is shorter
%i	Signed decimal integer (int)
%o	Unsigned octal (base 8) integer (int)
%s	String of text
%u	Unsigned decimal integer (int)
%x	Unsigned hexadecimal (base 16) integer (int)
%%	(percent character)

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Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
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