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From: rearl@geech.ai.mit.edu (Robert Earl)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: print % in c
Message-ID: <REARL.91Feb25134451@geech.ai.mit.edu>
Date: 25 Feb 91 18:44:51 GMT
References: <61516@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> <1991Feb25.180600.5004@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Sender: daemon@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu (Lucifer Maleficius)
Organization: (EVIL!)
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In-Reply-To: gordon@osiris.cso.uiuc.edu's message of Mon, 25 Feb 1991 18:06:00 GMT

In article <1991Feb25.180600.5004@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> gordon@osiris.cso.uiuc.edu (John Gordon) writes:

|	   To print special characters with printf(), precede the character
|   with a \ character.  Example:
|
|	   printf("This a percent sign: \%\n");
|	   printf("This is a backslash: \\\n");

The first example doesn't work-- you're still passing a `%' character
to printf(), in fact you're passing it a format character with no
corresponding argument, which really causes it to barf.

As the manual says, passing a double `%' to printf means to print a
literal `%' character.  And you must escape backslashes in any string
constant in source code, not just printf arguments.

--robert