Plain language: The snark can approach to within 3% of the boojum.
Here the “3” in “3%” is an an instance-specific result, hence it makes sense to code something like the following:
The snark can approach to within %d% of the boojum.
But of course, the trailing % sign is not displayed because the % sign is a format specifier for printf-like functions in several languages. What do we do? Double it of course!
The snark can approach to within %d%% of the boojum.
Now it displays correctly! We can now copy-paste the result into LaTeX for publishing.
But wait a minute. Why not ask the program to print the text with LaTex markup directly instead of us having to do copy-paste work? If we send the preceding output straight into the LaTeX file:
The snark can approach to within %d%% of the boojum.
We get the LaTeX output:
The snark can approach to within 3
What happened? Of course, in addition to being a format specifier in printf and friends, % is also a comment character in LaTeX, and blocks everything downstream on that line. To make LaTeX display a % character, it needs to be escaped with a backslash. Let’s escape it then:
The snark can approach to within %d\%% of the boojum.
Still doesn’t work, and it’s a new mode of failure now — we need both the backslash and the percent symbols in the output, and they keep getting in each other’s escape route. OK, so we do both: escape the backslash and double the percent:
The snark can approach to within %d\\%% of the boojum.
Finally, it works! The first backslash protects the second backslash from the printf function, and the doubled percent is perceived as a single percent sign, which makes printf display “\%” in its output, which is of course LaTeX’s input, where the backslash prevents the % from being read as a comment character, and causes it to be displayed.
Where we wanted to be:The snark can approach to within 3% of the boojum.
How we got there: The snark can approach to within %d\\%% of the boojum.
For those of you who don’t know Zawinski’s thoughts on regular expressions:
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions”. Now they have two problems.
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