printf and sprintf

What is the difference between printf and sprintf?

sprintf: Writes formatted data to a character string in memory instead of stdout

Syntax of sprintf is:

#include <stdio.h> int sprintf (char *string, const char *format [,item [,item]...]);

Here,

String refers to the pointer to a buffer in memory where the data is to be written.

Format refers to pointer to a character string defining the format.

Each item is a variable or expression specifying the data to write.

The value returned by sprintf is greater than or equal to zero if the operation is successful or in other words the number of characters written, not counting the terminating null character is returned and returns a value less than zero if an error occurred.

printf: Prints to stdout

Syntax for printf is:

printf format [argument]...

The only difference between sprintf() and printf() is that sprintf() writes data into a character array, while printf() writes data to stdout, the standard output device.