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@vnp's code is solid and helpful, but his stringify_state_helper is a single-purpose function, and still leaves a degree of repetition and memory management in stringify_state. I'd rather have general-purpose to_string that takes printf-style arguments, allocates sufficient space for the converted result, and prints into that space, and returns the result:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdarg.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

char *to_string(char const *fmt, ...) { 
    va_list args;
    va_start(args, fmt);

    va_list args_dupe;
    va_copy(args_dupe, args);

    int size = vsnprintf(NULL, 0, fmt, args);

    char *ret = malloc(size+1);

    if (ret != NULL)
        vsnprintf(ret, size+1, fmt, args_dupe);
    return ret;
}

In fairness, this does require a little more code, and the v*printf functions are a bit less known (and argument-list macros) a bit less known, so some may find it a bit more difficult to understand.

On the other hand, in exchange for that bit of extra investment, we get something that's more general, and works much more as I think most people would expect--for example, something like this:

char *s = to_string("%d, %d", 1, 2);