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Trio is a fully matured and stable set of printf and string functions designed be used by applications with focus on portability or with the need for additional features that are not supported by standard stdio implementation.
There are several cases where you may want to consider using trio:
- Portability across heterogeneous platforms.
- Embedded systems without stdio support.
- Extendability of unsupported features.
- Your native version doesn't do everything you need.
When you write applications that must be portable to a wide range of platforms you often have to deal with inadequate implementations of the stdio library functions. Most notably is the lack of secure formatting functions, such as snprintf, or the lack of parameter reordering commonly used for the internationalization of applications, such as the <num>$ modifier. Sometimes the feature you need is simply not present in stdio. So you end up spending much effort on determining which platforms supports what, and to write your own versions of various features. This is where trio can help you. Trio is a platform-independent implementation of the stdio printf and scanf functions and the string library functions.
The functionality described in the stdio standards is a compromise, and does unfortunately not include a mechanism to extend the functionality for an individual application. Oftentimes an application has the need for an extra feature, and the application code can become much more clear and readable by using an extension mechanism. Trio supports a range of useful extensions such as user-defined specifiers, passing of arguments in arrays, localized string scanning, thousand-separators, and arbitrary integer bases.
Trio fully implements the C99 (ISO/IEC 9899:1999) and UNIX98 (the Single Unix Specification, Version 2) standards, as well as many features from other implemenations, e.g. the GNU libc and BSD4.
Examples
1 · Output an integer as a binary number using a trio extension.
trio_printf("%..2i\n", number);
2 · Output a number with thousand-separator using a trio extension
trio_printf("%'f\n", 12345.6);
The thousand-separator described by the locale is used.
3 · Output an fixed length array of floating-point numbers.
double array[] = {1.0, 2.0, 3.0};
printf("%.2f %.2f %.2f\n", array[0], array[1], array[2]);
The same with two trio extensions (arguments are passed in an array, and
the first formatting specifier sets the sticky option so we do not have
to type all the formatting modifiers for the remaining formatting specifiers)
trio_printfv("%!.2f %f %f\n", array);
Another, and more powerful, application of being able to pass arguments
in an array is the creation of the printf/scanf statement at run-time,
where the formatting string, and thus the argument list, is based on an
external configuration file.
4 · Parse a string consisting of one or more upper-case alphabetic characters followed by one or more numeric characters.
sscanf(buffer, "%[A-Z]%[0-9]", alphabetic, numeric);
The same but with locale using a trio extension.
trio_sscanf(buffer, "%[:upper:]%[:digit:]", alphabetic, numeric);
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The trio license is MIT-like, to allow practicly everyone to be able to use it in almost any kind of software without having problems with our license.
This package is written by Bjorn Reese and Daniel Stenberg. Valuable bug fixes and extensions by Danny Dulai, Gisli Ottarsson and others.
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Here's some basic attempts to document this package.
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We have a mailing list setup to discuss all sorts of matters related to trio: bugs, features, other printf() clones and similar. subscribe to the mailing list.
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We have a project page over at sourceforge.
Get the most recent trio source code directly off git by doing this:
git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/ctrio/git trio
Page initially created on March 5th 1999