There's no reason to be using printf here. print will work just fine. The reason for your error, however, is that the '%' has a special meaning twice. First, it's interpreted as the start of a hash to be interpolated into the string. Your '\' correctly escapes it from this. However, the printf function then does another round of interpolation, and it expects certain codes in the string, which start with '%'. This time, you use the code '%%' to have it print a literal '%'. Your string that you would pass into printf would look like "...\%\%..."

In reply to Answer: How do I print a % (percentage sign)? by rlk

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