Other than as a modulus operator, what does the percent sign do in PHP?
For instance, I am looking at some PHP code, and see the following:
define('TABLE_PREFIX','%CONFIG-PREFIX');
Elsewhere, in a SQL file, I see the following. I expect the SQL script is being parsed by PHP.
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `%TABLE_PREFIX%api_key`;
Thank you
PHP doesn't intrinsically treat it specially within strings. It must be the application that's parsing the strings and deciding that % indicates some kind of variable value.
In fact, it looks like you're looking at the source code of a project called osTicket. In its installer, I found this line which corresponds to your given define:
$configfile= str_replace('%CONFIG-PREFIX',$_POST['prefix'],$configfile);
In PHP, nothing. Somewhere in whatever database driver you're using, the driver is parsing that string to put the prefix in, most likely with something similar to:
$sql = str_replace( '%TABLE_PREFIX%', TABLE_PREFIX, $sql);