curs_printw(3x) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUE | HISTORY | PORTABILITY | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

curs_printw(3X)                                          curs_printw(3X)

NAME         top

       printw, wprintw, mvprintw, mvwprintw, vwprintw, vw_printw - print
       formatted output in curses windows

SYNOPSIS         top

       #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         top

       The printw, wprintw, mvprintw and mvwprintw routines are
       analogous to printf [see printf(3)].  In effect, the string that
       would be output by printf is output instead as though waddstr
       were used on the given window.

       The vwprintw and vw_printw routines are analogous to vprintf [see
       printf(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         top

       Routines that return an integer return ERR upon failure and OK
       (SVr4 only specifies "an integer value other than ERR") upon
       successful completion.

       X/Open defines no error conditions.  In this implementation, an
       error may be returned if it cannot allocate enough memory for the
       buffer used to format the results.  It will return an error if
       the window pointer is null.

       Functions with a “mv” prefix first perform a cursor movement
       using wmove, and return an error if the position is outside the
       window, or if the window pointer is null.

HISTORY         top

       While printw was implemented in 4BSD, it was unused until 4.2BSD
       (which used it in games).  That early version of curses was
       before the ANSI C standard.  It did not use <varargs.h>, though
       that was available.  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 (or even declare functions) in the
       <curses.h> header until 1992.

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

       SVr3 added mvprintw, and mvwprintw, with a three-line summary
       saying that they were analogous to printf(3), explaining that the
       string which would be output from printf(3) would instead be
       output using waddstr on the given window.  SVr3 also added
       vwprintw, saying that the third parameter is a va_list, defined
       in <varargs.h>, and referring the reader to the manual pages for
       varargs and vprintf for detailed descriptions.

       SVr4 added no new variations of printw, but provided for using
       <varargs.h> or <stdarg.h> to define the va_list type.

       X/Open Curses added vw_printw to replace vwprintw, stating that
       its va_list definition requires <stdarg.h>.

PORTABILITY         top

       In this implementation, vw_printw and vwprintw are equivalent, to
       support legacy applications.  However, the latter (vwprintw) is
       obsolete:

       •   The XSI Curses standard, Issue 4 described these functions.
           The function vwprintw is marked TO BE WITHDRAWN, and is to be
           replaced by a function vw_printw using the <stdarg.h>
           interface.

       •   The Single Unix Specification, Version 2 states that
           vw_printw  is preferred to vwprintw since the latter requires
           including <varargs.h>, which cannot be used in the same file
           as <stdarg.h>.  This implementation uses <stdarg.h> for both,
           because that header is included in <curses.h>.

       •   X/Open Curses, Issue 5 (December 2007) marked vwprintw (along
           with vwscanw and the termcap interface) as withdrawn.

SEE ALSO         top

       curses(3X), curs_addstr(3X), curs_scanw(3X), curs_termcap(3X),
       printf(3), vprintf(3).

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the ncurses (new curses) project.
       Information about the project can be found at 
       ⟨https://www.gnu.org/software/ncurses/ncurses.html⟩.  If you have
       a bug report for this manual page, send it to
       bug-ncurses-request@gnu.org.  This page was obtained from the
       project's upstream Git mirror of the CVS repository
       ⟨https://github.com/mirror/ncurses.git⟩ on 2023-12-22.  (At that
       time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
       repository was 2023-03-12.)  If you discover any rendering
       problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there
       is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
       corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
       (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       man-pages@man7.org

                                                         curs_printw(3X)