How can I selectively escape percent (%) in Python strings?

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Chapters
00:00 Question
00:31 Accepted answer (Score 728)
00:43 Answer 2 (Score 61)
01:09 Answer 3 (Score 47)
01:21 Answer 4 (Score 10)
02:06 Thank you

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Full question
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1067...

Answer 1 links:
[PEP 3101]: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3101/

Answer 3 links:
[documentation]: https://docs.python.org/2/library/stdtyp...

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Tags
#python #escaping #python27

#avk47

ACCEPTED ANSWER

Score 738

>>> test = "have it break."
>>> selectiveEscape = "Print percent %% in sentence and not %s" % test
>>> print selectiveEscape
Print percent % in sentence and not have it break.

ANSWER 2

Score 62

Alternatively, as of Python 2.6, you can use new string formatting (described in PEP 3101):

'Print percent % in sentence and not {0}'.format(test)

which is especially handy as your strings get more complicated.

ANSWER 3

Score 50

try using %% to print % sign .

ANSWER 4

Score 10

You can't selectively escape %, as % always has a special meaning depending on the following character.

In the documentation of Python, at the bottem of the second table in that section, it states:

'%'        No argument is converted, results in a '%' character in the result.

Therefore you should use:

selectiveEscape = "Print percent %% in sentence and not %s" % (test, )

(please note the expicit change to tuple as argument to %)

Without knowing about the above, I would have done:

selectiveEscape = "Print percent %s in sentence and not %s" % ('%', test)

with the knowledge you obviously already had.