How can I format my output in C++? In other words, what is the C++ equivalent to the use of printf like this:
printf("%05d", zipCode);
I know I could just use printf in C++, but I would prefer the output operator <<.
Would you just use the following?
std::cout << "ZIP code: " << sprintf("%05d", zipCode) << std::endl;
This will do the trick, at least for non-negative numbers(a) such as the ZIP codes(b) mentioned in your question.
#include <iostream>
#include <iomanip>
using namespace std;
cout << setw(5) << setfill('0') << zipCode << endl;
// or use this if you don't like 'using namespace std;'
std::cout << std::setw(5) << std::setfill('0') << zipCode << std::endl;
The most common IO manipulators that control padding are:
std::setw(width) sets the width of the field.std::setfill(fillchar) sets the fill character.std::setiosflags(align) sets the alignment, where align is ios::left or ios::right.Note that these function affect the global state of the cout object. That means that doing this in one place will have unintended effects in later usages of std::cout, if you don't undo the manipulations!
And just on your preference for using <<, I'd strongly suggest you look into the fmt library (see https://github.com/fmtlib/fmt). This has been a great addition to our toolkit for formatting stuff and is much nicer than massively length stream pipelines, allowing you to do things like:
cout << fmt::format("{:05d}", zipCode);
The fmt::format functionality is included in C++20 as std::format.
C++23 brings std::print, which allows you to do std::print("{:05d}", zipCode); directly (with no need to go through cout).
(a) If you do need to handle negative numbers, you can use std::internal as follows:
cout << internal << setw(5) << setfill('0') << zipCode << endl;
This places the fill character between the sign and the magnitude.
(b) This ("all ZIP codes are non-negative") is an assumption on my part but a reasonably safe one, I'd warrant :-)