When writing a C program you might have the need to print the % percentage character using printf().

Perhaps you are working on a program that calculates percentages, which is kind of common when you’re just learning the language and you’re creating small programs.

How do you do so?

If you try to use it like this:

printf("%");

it will not work, and the compiler will give you a warning like

hello.c:9:14: warning: incomplete format specifier
      [-Wformat]
  printf("%");
          ^
1 warning generated.

and it is not printed.

To make it work, you need to write %%, like this:

printf("%%");

Lessons in this unit:

0:	Introduction
1:	Input and output
2:	Variable scope
3:	Static variables
4:	Global variables
5:	Type definitions
6:	Enumerations
7:	Structures
8:	Command line parameters
9:	Header files
10:	The preprocessor
11:	NULL values
12:	Boolean values
13:	Nesting functions
14:	Conversion specifiers
15:	Using quotes
16:	String length
17:	Returning strings
18:	Array length
19:	Looping through arrays
20:	Checking character values
21:	▶︎ Printing percentage signs
22:	Troubleshooting: Implicit function declarations