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I see that the code in many packages and examples contains percent signs % at the end of (many) lines. What are they used for? Do they affect the parsing of those lines?

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    Illustration of a potential problem that could arise if one is not careful: Tex Capacity Exceeded (if remove % after use of macro). Nov 21, 2012 at 20:42
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    After seeing comments that this question is not easily found, resulting in many questions for which it has been listed as duplicate, I have added an "alternate" question intended to make finding it easier. May 19, 2020 at 13:50
  • @barbarabeeton Sounds like a good change. You can even swap the two titles to have "why is my macro creating extra space" in front (and reference it in the text), I won't object to that. May 24, 2020 at 9:01
  • @FedericoPoloni -- Thanks for the confirmation. I think I'll stick with the "minimal" change; this is really your question, and it's a good one, clearly recognized by many as a puzzling circumstance. The addition is actually sort of an answer, so I'd rather not "pollute" your nice clean statement. (And it's nice to see you still around after such a long time.) May 24, 2020 at 13:01

4 Answers 4

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The short answer is what others have said, % starts a comment that goes to the end of the line. The normal effect is that it doesn't insert the space (or a \par) from the newline.

The longer answer is that as TeX parses its input, it reads the input file line by line. It strips off tailing whitespace (including any carriage return and newline) and then appends a character corresponding to the number in the \endlinechar register (provided it isn't -1 or greater than 255). By default, the value is 13 which corresponds to an ASCII carriage return. (TeX denotes this by ^^M.) You can change this register to be any value.

Unless the category codes have been changed (e.g., by the \obeylines macro), ^^M has category code 5, or end of line. When TeX reaches an end of line character, it discards the rest of the line and does one of three things: nothing, insert a space token, or insert a \par token, depending on what state TeX was in (S, M, or N, respectively).

So what does this have to do with %? Well, since the comment character causes TeX to ignore the rest of the input line, the end of line character that got appended gets ignored too.

This can frequently be important when playing around with category codes of ^^M (again, using \obeylines or similar).

The long answer is contained in Chapter 8 of The TeXbook.

One final use that no one has mentioned is that it is sometimes necessary for the line to end with a space character and not a end of line character. One example is that a backslash followed by a space is different than a backslash followed by a newline:

\show\ 
\show\ %

In the first line, there's a space following the \, but it'll get stripped off as described so what you get instead \^^M as you can see by what TeX prints out.

> \^^M=macro:
->\ .

That is, \^^M is a macro that expands to a control space: . In the second case, the comment prevents the space from being stripped off and the end of line char is ignored. TeX prints out the following.

> \ =\ .

That is, is a TeX primitive (see control space in either The TeXbook or TeX by Topic).

The usual reason for % is suppressing spaces in macro definitions. Consider the macros \nopercents and \percents below.

\documentclass{minimal}
\newcommand*\bracket[1]{[#1]}%
\newcommand*\nopercents[1]{
    \bracket{#1}
}
\newcommand*\percents[1]{%
    \bracket{#1}%
}
\begin{document}
X\nopercents{blah}X

X\percents{blah}X
\end{document}

Superficially, they appear to do the same thing: pass their input to \bracket. The difference is that the newlines becomes space tokens in \nopercents but are ignored in \percents due to the %. So X\nopercents{blah}X expands to X [blah] X whereas X\percents{blah}X expands to X[blah]X.

Addendum regarding spaces at the beginning of a line.

A % only swallows whatever follows it on a line. It does not have any effect on white spaces that begin the next line. Under most circumstances, spaces at the beginning of a line are ignored by TeX itself. There are a couple of exceptions:

  • When the line is otherwise entirely blank, it is interpreted as a paragraph break.

  • When \obeyspaces is in effect, every space is carried into the output; this is true within verbatim mode and can also be requested explicitly.

If \obeyspaces is in effect while a command or environment is being defined, if the definition occupies more than one line, any spaces at the beginning of a continuation line will be preserved in the definition. Indentation is often used in defining commands or environments to make the code easier to understand (usually a good thing), but while \obeyspaces is in effect, this has an unwelcome result and should be avoided. \obeyspaces should normally be used only within a delimited scope ({ } or \begingroup ... \endgroup) to avoid unwanted results.

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    @user14996 -- a % only swallows the end-of-line character. tex itself in most cases is what swallows (rather ignores) spaces at the beginning of a line; it's possible to turn this off, with, e.g., \obeyspaces, and this is very useful when quoting blocks of code, to preserve meaningful indentation. Sep 28, 2012 at 18:40
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    @user14996 -- it's true that a % causes (la)tex to ignore whatever comes after on that line, including, of course, the line break. but it's tex itself that ignores spaces at the beginning of a line, and a totally blank line (no % allowed, so that the line break can be seen) will be recognized as a paragraph break, equivalent to \par. the sources you cite are mistaken. and regarding \obeyspaces, that's defined in plain.tex and in the texbook, p.352. i'm not familiar with \obeywhitespace, and don't find it in my trusted collection of reference books. Sep 29, 2012 at 19:06
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    @user14996 -- line-initial whitespace is preserved by (la)tex within most "verbatim" environments. when a new command is being defined within such an environment, spaces must not be input at the beginnings of lines to make the definition easier for someone to read (usually a polite thing to do, as well as being helpful when one has to diagnose problems); such spaces will be carried into the output. Oct 7, 2012 at 11:22
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    @user14996 -- most "ordinary" users should feel free to use line-initial whitespace to make input easier to comprehend. the only time it's really necessary to "be careful" is in verbatim-type environments, especially when defining commands to be used in such environments. with this one important exception, line-initial whatespace, used consistently, is generally a good thing. Oct 9, 2012 at 17:46
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    @PieterStroobants If the line ends with a control word (a control sequence consisting of catcode 11 characters)—but not a control word (a control sequence consisting of 1 character with catcode different from 11) nor a control space—spaces are ignored so there's no need for %. If the line ends with another token, the end of line will become a space. If you don't want the space, use %. Sometimes you want the space, e.g., after number or glue specifications: \count@=37 you wouldn't use % so TeX inserts the space and thus ends the number. See TeXbyTopic, section 2.10.2 for details.
    – TH.
    May 11, 2016 at 20:12
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You already got lots of answers. You can also just experiment yourself:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
Hello%
world!
\end{document}

Try compiling this with and without the %. Then you see yourself that the % makes the space produced by the newline disappear. (Note that you'll still get the space if you write Hello % with a space before the % – try it out!) All the details are given in TH's great answer.

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A percent sign, %, allows to end a line without generating a space character -- very useful when writing macros.

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When I was starting out with TeX, I have read many times that the percent sign "swallows" all the whitespace after it. Whitespace includes spaces, tabs, and linebreaks.

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    @Kit -- actually, a percent sign swallows everything that follows it, not just whitespace. so it can also be used as a really convenient mechanism to insert by-line comments in macro code (and other input). Oct 12, 2012 at 20:39
  • @barbarabeeton -- I think this answer is referring to the fact that it swallows all the initial whitespace on the next line. Since a common use of % is to control presence/absence of whitespace, this is good to know, and none of the other answers have mentioned it. It means that even when you are formatting your lines via indentation, using % will still work to eliminate whitespace between lines.
    – Matt
    May 21, 2017 at 16:06
  • @barbarabeeton -- Ah, I see now that this is discussed in the comments under the first answer.
    – Matt
    May 21, 2017 at 16:18

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