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

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

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.

try using %% to print % sign .

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.