This section describes miscellaneous conversions for printf.
The ‘%c’ conversion prints a single character. The ‘-’ flag can be used to specify left-justification in the field, but no other flags are defined, and no precision or type modifier can be given. For example:
printf ("%c%c%c%c%c", "h", "e", "l", "l", "o"); prints ‘hello’.
The ‘%s’ conversion prints a string. The corresponding argument must be a string. A precision can be specified to indicate the maximum number of characters to write; otherwise characters in the string up to but not including the terminating null character are written to the output stream. The ‘-’ flag can be used to specify left-justification in the field, but no other flags or type modifiers are defined for this conversion. For example:
printf ("%3s%-6s", "no", "where"); prints ‘ nowhere ’ (note the leading and trailing spaces).
© 1996–2018 John W. Eaton
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https://octave.org/doc/interpreter/Other-Output-Conversions.html