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From: hunt@spar.SPAR.SLB.COM (Neil Hunt)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: printf and variable length string format (asterisk)
Message-ID: <122@spar.SPAR.SLB.COM>
Date: Mon, 23-Nov-87 14:20:41 EST
Article-I.D.: spar.122
Posted: Mon Nov 23 14:20:41 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 26-Nov-87 19:43:46 EST
References: <692@zycad.UUCP>
Reply-To: hunt@spar.UUCP (Neil Hunt)
Organization: SPAR - Schlumberger Palo Alto Research
Lines: 39

In article <692@zycad.UUCP> kjb@zycad.UUCP (Kevin Buchs) writes:
>
>I want to print out a string whose length I will not know ahead, and which
>is not null terminated.  I thought the following use of the asterisk
>precision delimiter would work:
>	
>char *a = "hello"; int i;
>for (i=0; i<6; i++) printf("%*s\n", i, a);
>
>I thought it would print:
>
>h
>he
>hel
>hell
>hello
>
>but I got:
>
>hello
>hello
>hello
>hello
>hello
>
>Does the asterisk not work with the s descriptor?  Or, am I using it wrong.
>Is there another way to do this (except fwrite)?

The format "%8s" prints a string in a min field width of 8 characters.
The format "%.8s" trucactes a string to a max field width of 8.

I just tried it, and the same applies to a variable specified field:
try:

char *a = "hello"; int i;
for (i=0; i<6; i++) printf("%.*s\n", i, a);

which prints what you were expecting.

Neil/.