I was messing around with a parallel LCD earlier, and I could not figure out how to display variables to it. I was becoming agitated when an idea came to mind. When I programmed clocks, I remember breaking the time down into four segments. The same thing applies here. Bingo. Below is my test code in C++ to emulate C. The only difference is the integers on a computer are 4 BYTES in length. In the test code for a negative numbers in a microcontroller, there will need to be an overloaded function to send signed integers to since an unsigned integer might be misinterpreted as signed. There will be more challenges ahead. There will need to be other approaches for floating numbers.
There is no error checking in the code below. Be sure that you do not exceed the length of the character array. They will always need one more place to account for the null character.