Embed < and > as text in a document

Question

I need to create a code sample where I want "<" and ">" to be interpreted as standard text. If I do the following

<pre>
    Some content that contains <and>
</pre>

It will not be interpreted properly unless I html encode my "<"/ ">" characters. Is there simple way around this?

Don't know if you mean something like the top answer in this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1787322/htmlspecialchars-equivalent-in-javascript ? — Michael Schmidt, May 12 '13 at 07:47
Maybe this can help: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1219860/javascript-jquery-html-encoding? — Andi, May 12 '13 at 07:53
Thanks @Andi I'll use that. I'll have to load files via ajax calls instead of a simple copy paste but I guess its better than way anyways since code samples will stay relevant. — basarat, May 12 '13 at 07:58

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered May 12 '13 at 07:43

4

You can encode the brackets:

So:

<pre>
    Some content that contains &lt;and&gt;
</pre>

answered May 12 '13 at 07:43

Oded

2

@0xBAADF00D - Technically, yes. But I like the symmetry and explicitness here. – Oded May 12 '13 at 07:45

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered May 12 '13 at 07:45

1

Because your HTML document is XML, <and> is a new tag.

You have no choice but to encode it.

answered May 12 '13 at 07:45

magnetik

Thanks for explicitly mentioning "no choice". – basarat May 12 '13 at 07:55
-1 - HTML != XML. For example `
` is valid HTML, but not valid XML. HTML _is_ however SGML (though HTML 5 has divorced itself from that, IIRC) – Oded May 12 '13 at 08:10

2 Answers2