In C99 snprintf
(примечание: Windows и SUSv2 не обеспечивают реализацию snprintf (или _snprintf), соответствующую стандарту) :
7.19.6.5 The snprintf function
Synopsis
[#1]
#include <stdio.h>
int snprintf(char * restrict s, size_t n,
const char * restrict format, ...);
Description
[#2] The snprintf function is equivalent to fprintf, except
that the output is written into an array (specified by
argument s) rather than to a stream. If n is zero, nothing
is written, and s may be a null pointer. Otherwise, output
characters beyond the n-1st are discarded rather than being
written to the array, and a null character is written at the
end of the characters actually written into the array. If
copying takes place between objects that overlap, the
behavior is undefined.
Returns
[#3] The snprintf function returns the number of characters
that would have been written had n been sufficiently large,
not counting the terminating null character, or a negative
value if an encoding error occurred. Thus, the null-
terminated output has been completely written if and only if
the returned value is nonnegative and less than n.
Например:
len = snprintf(NULL, 0, "%s\n", some_string);
if (len > 0) {
newstring = malloc(len + 1);
if (newstring) {
snprintf(newstring, len + 1, "%s\n", some_string);
}
}