Overview

fmt (formerly cppformat) is an open-source formatting library. It can be used as a fast and safe alternative to printf and IOStreams.

.. raw:: html

<div class="panel panel-default"> <div class="panel-heading">What users say:</div> <div class="panel-body"> Thanks for creating this library. It’s been a hole in C++ for a long time. I’ve used both boost::format and loki::SPrintf, and neither felt like the right answer. This does. </div> </div>

.. _format-api-intro:

Format API

The replacement-based Format API provides a safe alternative to printf, sprintf and friends with comparable or better performance <http://zverovich.net/2013/09/07/integer-to-string-conversion-in-cplusplus.html>. The format string syntax <syntax.html> is similar to the one used by str.format <http://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#str.format>_ in Python:

.. code:: c++

fmt::format("The answer is {}.", 42);

The fmt::format function returns a string "The answer is 42.". You can use fmt::memory_buffer to avoid constructing std::string:

.. code:: c++

fmt::memory_buffer out; format_to(out, "For a moment, {} happened.", "nothing"); out.data(); // returns a pointer to the formatted data

The fmt::print function performs formatting and writes the result to a file:

.. code:: c++

fmt::print(stderr, "System error code = {}\n", errno);

The file argument can be omitted in which case the function prints to stdout:

.. code:: c++

fmt::print("Don't {}\n", "panic");

The Format API also supports positional arguments useful for localization:

.. code:: c++

fmt::print("I'd rather be {1} than {0}.", "right", "happy");

Named arguments can be created with fmt::arg. This makes it easier to track what goes where when multiple values are being inserted:

.. code:: c++

fmt::print("Hello, {name}! The answer is {number}. Goodbye, {name}.", fmt::arg("name", "World"), fmt::arg("number", 42));

If your compiler supports C++11 user-defined literals, the suffix _a offers an alternative, slightly terser syntax for named arguments:

.. code:: c++

fmt::print("Hello, {name}! The answer is {number}. Goodbye, {name}.", "name"_a="World", "number"_a=42);

The _format suffix may be used to format string literals similar to Python:

.. code:: c++

std::string message = "{0}{1}{0}"_format("abra", "cad");

Other than the placement of the format string on the left of the operator, _format is functionally identical to fmt::format. In order to use the literal operators, they must be made visible with the directive using namespace fmt::literals;. Note that this brings in only _a and _format but nothing else from the fmt namespace.

.. _safety:

Safety

The library is fully type safe, automatic memory management prevents buffer overflow, errors in format strings are reported using exceptions or at compile tim. For example, the code

.. code:: c++

fmt::format("The answer is {:d}", "forty-two");

throws a format_error exception with description "unknown format code 'd' for string", because the argument "forty-two" is a string while the format code d only applies to integers, while

.. code:: c++

format(fmt("The answer is {:d}"), "forty-two");

reports a compile-time error for the same reason on compilers that support relaxed constexpr.

The following code

.. code:: c++

fmt::format("Cyrillic letter {}", L'\x42e');

produces a compile-time error because wide character L'\x42e' cannot be formatted into a narrow string. You can use a wide format string instead:

.. code:: c++

fmt::format(L"Cyrillic letter {}", L'\x42e');

For comparison, writing a wide character to std::ostream results in its numeric value being written to the stream (i.e. 1070 instead of letter 'ю' which is represented by L'\x42e' if we use Unicode) which is rarely what is needed.

Compact binary code

The library is designed to produce compact per-call compiled code. For example (godbolt <https://godbolt.org/g/TZU4KF>_),

.. code:: c++

#include <fmt/core.h>

int main() { fmt::print("The answer is {}.", 42); }

compiles to just

.. code:: asm

main: # @main sub rsp, 24 mov qword ptr [rsp], 42 mov rcx, rsp mov edi, offset .L.str mov esi, 17 mov edx, 2 call fmt::v5::vprint(fmt::v5::basic_string_view<char>, fmt::v5::format_args) xor eax, eax add rsp, 24 ret .L.str: .asciz "The answer is {}."

.. _portability:

Portability

The library is highly portable and relies only on a small set of C++11 features:

variadic templates
type traits
rvalue references
decltype
trailing return types
deleted functions

These are available since GCC 4.4, Clang 2.9 and MSVC 18.0 (2013). For older compilers use fmt version 4.x <https://github.com/fmtlib/fmt/releases/tag/4.1.0>_ which continues to be maintained and only requires C++98.

The output of all formatting functions is consistent across platforms. In particular, formatting a floating-point infinity always gives inf while the output of printf is platform-dependent in this case. For example,

.. code::

fmt::print("{}", std::numeric_limits<double>::infinity());

always prints inf.

.. _ease-of-use:

Ease of Use

fmt has a small self-contained code base with the core library consisting of just three header files and no external dependencies. A permissive BSD license <https://github.com/fmtlib/fmt#license>_ allows using the library both in open-source and commercial projects.

.. raw:: html

<a class="btn btn-success" href="https://github.com/fmtlib/fmt">GitHub Repository</a>