%s %d What's this mean?

[saidbakr]

Hi
I always see this speciall charcters , specially in printf()
printf("%.2f", $var)
so what are these char (% S d f) etc means and what are they do?
If there any tutorial to explaine that , I would be glad.

[barand]

[man]printf[/man] is for outputting formatted data

$var = 12.34567;
printf('%0.2f',$var);

takes a floating point value, $var, and formats it to 2 dec places so you get
12.35

Simailarly, %s, %d are for string and integers.

so printf ('%03d', 7) gives 007
(integer 3 chars with leading 0's)

See [man]sprintf[/man] for full explanation.

hth