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ASPRINTF

Section: Linux Programmer's Manual (3)
Updated: 2017-09-15
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NAME

asprintf, vasprintf - print to allocated string

SYNOPSIS

#define _GNU_SOURCE /* See feature_test_macros(7) */
#include <stdio.h>

int asprintf(char **strp, const char *fmt, ...);

int vasprintf(char **strp, const char *fmt, va_list ap);

DESCRIPTION

The functions asprintf() and vasprintf() are analogs of sprintf(3) and vsprintf(3), except that they allocate a string large enough to hold the output including the terminating null byte (aq\0aq), and return a pointer to it via the first argument. This pointer should be passed to free(3) to release the allocated storage when it is no longer needed.

RETURN VALUE

When successful, these functions return the number of bytes printed, just like sprintf(3). If memory allocation wasn't possible, or some other error occurs, these functions will return -1, and the contents of strp are undefined.

ATTRIBUTES

For an explanation of the terms used in this section, see attributes(7).

Interface	Attribute	Value
asprintf(), vasprintf()	Thread safety	MT-Safe locale

CONFORMING TO

These functions are GNU extensions, not in C or POSIX. They are also available under *BSD. The FreeBSD implementation sets strp to NULL on error.

COLOPHON

This page is part of release 4.13 of the Linux man-pages project. A description of the project, information about reporting bugs, and the latest version of this page, can be found at https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.