Perl is not C. Though I occasionally use sprintf in Perl, I rarely use printf, whose doco warns:

Don't fall into the trap of using a printf when a simple print would do. The print is more efficient and less error prone.

Hope the following test program clarifies:

use strict;
use warnings;

my $ca = 'A';
print "$ca\n";              # outputs A
printf "%s\n", $ca;         # outputs A
printf "%c\n", ord($ca);    # outputs A
printf "%x\n", ord($ca);    # outputs 41
printf "%d\n", ord($ca);    # outputs 65
[download]

See also: ord, chr, hex, oct, sprintf