Recently I started dabbing into large number abbreviations turning pure numbers like 1000 to 1,000 or 1k and I came across string.format which could allow me to make that happen. I read through it all and I know how different specifiers work.
For example:
local foo = 1234.5
print(string.format("The Magic Number is %d",foo)) --> The Magic Number is 1234
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print(string.format("To allow decimal, %.1f",foo)) --> To allow decimal, 1234.5
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print(string.format("The exponent of %d is %e", foo, foo) --> The exponent of 12345 is 1.2345e+03
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-- And then you get to something like this
string.format("This is the result, %c",foo)) --> This is the result, ďż˝
It can format integers like %d or %i specifier but out of the entire specifiers this one just prints symbols. That begs the question, what does %c do?
It looks like it is used to turn numbers into icons? String Patterns (roblox.com) I think it is for different characters, like emojis that you can not usually print.
Ok, just looked a little harder and found this aritcle which ROBLOX linked. Apparently it is for “control characters.” Control character - Wikipedia
I read the article a little bit. Pretty advanced stuff going around that doesn’t get seen by the player. Anyway this gets my curiosity on it over so thank you for the help.
The %c (char) specifier is for converting numbers into characters:
local foo = 65
print(string.format("I'm the letter %c",foo)) -- I'm the letter A
Not sure why its not documented on the dev hub, but assuming roblox uses the standard lua string libraries’ format function, then all the specifiers (expect %q) follow C’s printf specifiers; From the Lua 5.1 manual:
The format string follows the same rules as the printf family of standard C functions…[expect for the %q specifier and modifiers]
You got the question mark symbol when you used 1234.5 because it isn’t a valid ASCII decimal value. (they only go up to 127).
As for control characters, they aren’t really related to format strings themselves; they are used in a string to denote a specific action, like \n or \r. In the case of pattern matching %c means something different than with string formatting, it’s a character class meant to match with control characters:
local String = "This is a line \n This is another line"
print(String) --[[
This is a line
This is another line
]]
print(string.match(String, "%c(.+)")) --"This is another line"
Glad I could help!