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

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.

try using %% to print % sign .

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.

If the formatting template was read from a file, and you cannot ensure the content doubles the percent sign, then you probably have to detect the percent character and decide programmatically whether it is the start of a placeholder or not. Then the parser should also recognize sequences like %d (and other letters that can be used), but also %(xxx)s etc.

Similar problem can be observed with the new formats -- the text can contain curly braces.

I have tried different methods to print a subplot title, look how they work. It's different when i use Latex.

It works with '%%' and 'string'+'%' in a typical case.

If you use Latex it worked using 'string'+'%'

So in a typical case:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
fig,ax = plt.subplots(4,1)
float_number = 4.17
ax[0].set_title('Total: (%1.2f' %float_number + '%)')
ax[1].set_title('Total: (%1.2f%%)' %float_number)
ax[2].set_title('Total: (%1.2f' %float_number + '%%)')
ax[3].set_title('Total: (%1.2f' %float_number + '%)')

Title examples with %

If we use latex:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib
font = 'family' : 'normal',
 'weight' : 'bold',
 'size' : 12
matplotlib.rc('font', **font)
matplotlib.rcParams['text.usetex'] = True
matplotlib.rcParams['text.latex.unicode'] = True
fig,ax = plt.subplots(4,1)
float_number = 4.17
#ax[0].set_title('Total: (%1.2f%)' %float_number) This makes python crash
ax[1].set_title('Total: (%1.2f%%)' %float_number)
ax[2].set_title('Total: (%1.2f' %float_number + '%%)')
ax[3].set_title('Total: (%1.2f' %float_number + '%)')

We get this:
Title example with % and latex