c - what's the difference between the printf and vprintf function families, and when should I use one over the other?

Question

I understand that the difference between the printf, fprintf, sprintf etc functions and the vprintf, vfprintf, vsprintf etc functions has to do with how they deal with the function arguments. But how specifically? Is there really any reason to use one over the other? Should I just always use printf as that is a more common thing to see in C, or is there a legitimate reason to pick vprintf instead?

Answer 1

printf() and friends are for normal use. vprintf() and friends are for when you want to write your own printf()-like function. Say you want to write a function to print errors:

int error(char *fmt, ...)
{
    int result;
    va_list args;
    va_start(args, fmt);
    // what here?
    va_end(args);
    return result;
}

You'll notice that you can't pass args to printf(), since printf() takes many arguments, rather than one va_list argument. The vprintf() functions, however, do take a va_list argument instead of a variable number of arguments, so here is the completed version:

int error(char *fmt, ...)
{
    int result;
    va_list args;
    va_start(args, fmt);
    fputs("Error: ", stderr);
    result = vfprintf(stderr, fmt, args);
    va_end(args);
    return result;
}