Manual Pages  — curs_printw

 printw,  wprintw,  mvprintw,  mvwprintw,  vwprintw,  vw_printw - write formatted output to a curses window

SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION RETURN VALUE NOTES PORTABILITY HISTORY SEE ALSO

#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);

 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.

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.

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.

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 However, the latter is obsolete.

»	X/Open Curses, Issue 4 Version 2 (1996), marked  vwprintw as requiring  varargs.h and TO BE WITHDRAWN, and specified  vw_printw using the  stdarg.h interface.
»	X/Open Curses, Issue 5, Draft 2 (December 2007) marked vwprintw (along with vwscanw and the termcap interface) as withdrawn.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).
»	ncurses provides  vwprintw, but marks it as deprecated.

While  printw was implemented in 4BSD (November 1980), it was unused until 4.2BSD (August 1983), which employed it for games. That early version of curses preceded the ANSI C standard of 1989. It did not use  varargs.h, though that 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.

SVr2 (1984) documented  printw and  wprintw tersely as printf on  stdscr and printf on win, respectively.

SVr3 (1987) added  mvprintw and  mvwprintw, with a three-line summary 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 also implemented  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.

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