Sprintf

Sprintf is a common name for a family of formatting functions that generate a formatted string from a format specification and a set of arguments. The core idea is to substitute placeholders in the format string with representations of the supplied values, returning or storing the resulting string instead of printing it directly. The exact API and behavior vary by language, but the concept is widely used across systems programming and application development.

In C, the function sprintf writes the formatted data into a user-provided buffer. Its signature is int sprintf(char *str, const char *format, ...). It does not perform bounds checking on the destination buffer, which can lead to buffer overflows if the buffer is too small. Because of this risk, snprintf, which accepts the buffer size, is preferred for new code.

In Go, the equivalent is fmt.Sprintf, found in the fmt package. It returns a string and uses the same or similar format verbs as printf, for example: s := fmt.Sprintf("%d %s", 42, "apples").

PHP also provides a similar function named sprintf that returns a formatted string. In many languages, using a string-producing version of printf helps avoid immediate I/O side effects and allows composing messages before display or logging. Common concerns include format-string mismatches, type safety, and locale-dependent formatting.