Different format control characters in the format specifier

Format specifiers begin with a percentage character (%) and end with a format control character. It tells the printf statement how to output an item. The format control character decides what kind of value to print. The rest of the format specifier is made up of optional modifiers that control field width. The following are the format control characters used in format specifiers with printf in AWK:

• %c: It prints a single character. If the argument is a number, then its corresponding ASCII character is printed. If a string is given as the argument, then only the first character of that string is printed. For example, if we give 65 to printf for printing, it outputs the letter A, which is the ASCII equivalent of 65:

$ awk 'BEGIN { printf "ASCII representation of 65 = character %c\n", 65 }'

The output on execution of the preceding code is as follows:

ASCII representation of 65 = character A

• %d and %i: They print only the integer part of...