How can I write an unformated string to file, i.e., without interpreting % and any other special characters

I am trying to write strings (after some manipulation) from 1 file to another (line by line). These strings may contain things like "%" or other special characters. How can I write them to file and tell Matlab NOT to interpret them as placeholders or special characters but as plain text?

The obvious but awkward way would be to loop through all possible special chars and escape them one by one but I was hoping for a more elegant solution, e.g., a simple

 fprint(fid,STRING,'interpreter','none')

that simply writes the string to file instead of an

 fprintf(fid,STRING)

that looks for placeholders in STRING and tries to replace them. Thanks.

[Bish Erbas]

Have you looked into textscan ?

Answer 1

[Kelly Kearney]

You can pass the string as a parameter to a simple '%s' formatter, rather than using the string itself as a format:

>> fprintf('%s\n', 'Print this literally %s\n')
Print this literally %s\n

[oliver]

Excellent. Elegant and short. Thanks for the quick reply.