formatting understanding with different specifiers

Im confused over the following field specifiers

I was always under the impression and also by definition in matlab documentation of the following

format short was 5 characters long it shows as 4 because the 5 is a round digit and is "hiden" I have used this to my advantage actually several times

Same with format long

only 16 characters and the 16th is hidden showing 15

for example

EDU>> format short
EDU>> x = 1/3

x =

      0.3333

EDU>> format long
EDU>> x = 1/3

x =

     0.333333333333333

If you take your time counting them you will see there is 5 and 15 as expected

However I'm confused about the specifics of the conversion specifier d and f

format short

for k =1:9
    fprintf('%f\n',k);
end

If you run this foolish little bit of code I'm getting the following result

1.000000
2.000000
3.000000
4.000000
5.000000
6.000000
7.000000
8.000000
9.000000

obviously this is showing 7 digits Why am i getting this result?

From what i have always seen i should get

1.0000 for a total of 6 with one hidden etc

Also if i run the same loop with d

format short

for k =1:9
    fprintf('%d\n',k);
end

of course i get 1 2 3 4 ......

Now according to the matlab help file %d is

Decimal notation (signed)

So can someone explain to me why i am getting what I'm getting? Thanks in advance

[Stephen23]

format and the output of fprintf are completely unrelated to each other.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

The "format" command has no interaction with fprintf() or sprintf() formatting at all.