Printing decimal to ascii character, my command does not output as intended

Question

I wanted to output a string of all the ascii characters with the following command

for i in `seq 32 127`; do printf "%c" $i; done

The output of the above command is:

33333334444444444555555555566666666667777777777..............

It's the first (from the left) digit of each number.

Looking through this site I came across the answer to my problem How to print all printable ASCII chars in CLI?, however I still don't understand why my original snippet does not output the ascii characters as intended.

Solution 1

You can't directly print the ascii codes by using the printf "%c" $i like in C.

You have to first convert the decimal value of i into its octal value and then you have to print it using using printf and putting \ in front of their respective octal values.

To print A, you have to convert the decimal 65 into octal, i.e. 101, and then you have to print that octal value as:

printf "\101\n"

This will print A.

So you have to modify it to :

for i in `seq 32 127`; do printf \\$(printf "%o" $i);done;

But by using awk you can directly print like in C language

awk 'BEGIN{for(i=32;i<=127;i++)printf "%c",i}';echo

Solution 2

%c Interprets the associated argument as char: only the first character of a given argument is printed

You seem to already have a way to print them, but here is one variant.

for i in `seq 32 127`; do printf "\x$(printf "%x" $i) $i"; done

Solution 3

You need printf, but only once; you can replace one use of printf by the simpler and more efficient echo plus Bash escape sequences:

With hexagesimals:

for i in `seq 32 127`; do
  echo -ne \\x$(printf %02x $i)
done

With octals:

for i in `seq 32 127`; do
  echo -ne \\0$(printf %03o $i)
done

Comments

[sr_]

POSIX dictates this, here's a comp.unix.shell thread on why it's the right thing ;)

[Ifthikhan]

@sr_ Thanks for pointing out the thread. It had the explanation I was looking for.

[manatwork]

In bash and zsh this can be done without the loop and without the external command: printf $(printf '\%o' {32..127}).

[pradeepchhetri]

@manatwork: ya exactly..thanks a lot for pointing it out..

[Ifthikhan]

@pradeepchhetri : Thank you for the detailed response and it seemed to cover most of the required details (hence I choose your answer). However I guess it missed out an important piece of information which can be found in the following message at unix.derkeiler.com/Newsgroups/comp.unix.shell/2007-07/…. It states that "The argument operands shall be treated as strings if the corresponding conversion specifier is b, c, or s..."