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The pages on this site contain documentation for very old MS-DOS software, purely for historical purposes. If you're looking for up-to-date documentation, particularly for programming, you should not rely on the information found here, as it will be woefully out of date.

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     Format specifications are introduced by the percent sign (%) and
     have the following form:
 
          % [*] [width] [ { F | N } ] [ { h | l } ] type
 
     Each field of the format specification is a single character or a
     number signifying a particular format option. The type character,
     which appears after the last optional format field, determines
     whether the input field is interpreted as a character, a string,
     or a number. The simplest format specification contains only the
     percent sign and a type character (for example, %s).
 
     See: ◄Prefixes► ◄Type►
 
     If a percent sign (%) is followed by a character that has no
     meaning as a format-control character, that character is treated
     as ordinary. For example, to specify that a percent-sign character
     is to be input, use %%.
 
     An asterisk (*) following the percent sign suppresses assignment
     of the next input field, which is interpreted as a field of the
     specified type. The field is scanned but not stored.
 
     The width is a positive decimal integer controlling the maximum
     number of characters to be read from stdin. No more than <width>
     characters are converted and stored at the corresponding argument.
     Fewer than <width> characters may be read if a white-space
     character (space, tab, or newline) or a character that cannot
     be converted according to the given format occurs before <width>
     is reached.
                                    -♦-