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curs_printw 3x 2025-04-19 ncurses 6.5 Library calls

curs_printw(3x)                  Library calls                 curs_printw(3x)




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(3x) 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(3x) 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  However, the latter is obsolete.

       o   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           requiring varargs.h and "TO BE WITHDRAWN", and specified  vw_printw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.

       o   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).

       o   ncurses provides vwprintw, but marks it as deprecated.


HISTORY

       4BSD (1980) introduced wprintw and its variants.  It implemented all as
       functions, not macros; this initial distribution of curses preceded the
       ANSI C standard of 1989, prior to which a variadic macro  facility  was
       not  widely  available.   printw  went unused in Berkeley distributions
       until 4.1cBSD (1983), which employed it in games.  4BSD's  wprintw  did
       not  use varargs.h, which 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.

       4BSD documented printw and wprintw tersely as "printf  on  stdscr"  and
       "printf on win", respectively.

       SVr3  summarized the functions in three lines, 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 added 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.


SEE ALSO

       curses(3x), curs_addstr(3x), curs_scanw(3x), printf(3), vprintf(3)



ncurses 6.5                       2025-04-19                   curs_printw(3x)