Let's say I have this following bit of code in C:
double var;
scanf("%lf", &var);
printf("%lf", var);
printf("%f", var);
It reads from stdin variable 'var' and then prints twice in stdout 'var'. I understand that's how you read a double variable from stdin, but my questions are:
As far as I read manual pages, scanf says that 'l' length modifier indicates (in case of floating points) that the argument is of type double rather than of type float, so you can have 'lf, le, lg'.
As for printing, officially, the manual says that 'l' applies only to integer types. So it might be not supported on some systems or by some standards. For instance, I get the following error message when compiling with gcc -Wall -Wextra -pedantic
a.c:6:1: warning: ISO C90 does not support the ‘%lf’ gnu_printf format [-Wformat=]
So you may want to doublecheck if your standard supports the syntax.
To conclude, I would say that you read with '%lf' and you print with '%f'.
When a float is passed to printf, it is automatically converted to a double. This is part of the default argument promotions, which apply to functions that have a variable parameter list (containing ...), largely for historical reasons. Therefore, the “natural” specifier for a float, %f, must work with a double argument. So the %f and %lf specifiers for printf are the same; they both take a double value.
When scanf is called, pointers are passed, not direct values. A pointer to float is not converted to a pointer to double (this could not work since the pointed-to object cannot change when you change the pointer type). So, for scanf, the argument for %f must be a pointer to float, and the argument for %lf must be a pointer to double.
Source: Stackoverflow.com