How to get a string before a character? (20%)

[MisterGrinch2017]

So I have this situation where I don’t know the numbers in front of the string: “%”.

For example, I could get string “1220.44%”, string “20%”, string “0.4%”, etc.
How do I get the numbers in front of the ‘%’ sign?

Keep in mind that the “input” or data type I have access to is always a string.

[Sleazel]

Use string.format. As % is a special character, to use it with this method you will need to type it twice:

print(string.format("%f%%",21.1142))
-- output: 
-- 21.1142%

To restrict fraction to for example two places after dot, use:

--print(string.format("%f.2%%",21.1142)) 
EDIT:
-- Correction
print(string.format("%.2f%%",21.1142)) 
-- 21.11%

For whole numbers, use %d%% instead.

[MisterGrinch2017]

I don’t want the “%”. From your example, I only want the “21.1142” as a string.

I’m getting “21.1142%”, and I want “21.1142” but I won’t know how many numbers are in front of the “%”.

[yusatial (yusa)]

They wanted the string in front of ‘%’

@MisterGrinch2017

How do I get the numbers in front of the ‘%’ sign?

This is going to work on all string types, but please note that if it’s “hello%%” or “1.131%%”, it’s going to return “hello” and “1.131” without the extra %.

string.match(percentage_string, "(.-)%%")

(Note: If you want the additional ‘%’, like ‘hello%%’ → ‘hello%’, you can use (.-%%) as well.)

[MisterGrinch2017]

that’s just what I needed I will do checks! ty