Special character (%) in language string

Question

I want to output a float price using a language constant like this:

MYCONST_VAT="incl. %.2f&#37 VAT"

So doing this:

echo Text::sprintf('MYCONST_VAT', 19);

outputs:

incl. 19.00% VAT

The problem is if sending Joomla mails using constants like that, the mails display the output like this:

incl. 19.00&#37 VAT

Answer 1

You are missing a semicolon at the end of the entity and also such string would need to be run through html_entity_decode(). However, the correct and much simpler way to escape the % character in sprintf() is using the % character:

MYCONST_VAT="incl. %.2f%% VAT"