escaping formatting characters in java String.format

Question

This question is pretty much the same as this .Net question exept for java.

How do you escape the %1$ characters in a java string.format?

THe reason I need to do this is that I'm building up a string that will later have more info inserted into it. I've thought of having one of the args just be "%1$" but that doesn't seem to be very elegant?

sorry if this is obvious my java is a tad rusty.

Answer 1

You can just double up the %

Answer 2

Either you can use the proposal of Draemon, either you can also have a look at java.text.MessageFormat class that has more powerfull formatting abilities than String.format()