What are these characters? ">&lt"

[colonel]

They have shown up in script-generated html code and they are screwing
up my html display. Anyone have any clue as to where I could begin
looking? The script just generates html like this:

echo "<TR><TD>$PROC_1 - $PROC_1_CURRENT instances running</TD><TD>" >>
$BBTMP/$TEST

and somehow these "&gt;&lt" characters are being inserted, or
misunderstood from somewhere...

any advice?

Thanks,

the colonel

 

[Mark Parnell]

They have shown up in script-generated html code and they are screwing
up my html display. Anyone have any clue as to where I could begin
looking? The script just generates html like this:

&gt; is the named character entity reference for the "greater than"
symbol (>).
Likewise &lt; is the "less than" symbol (<).

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/sgml/entities.html

 

[colonel]

&gt; is the named character entity reference for the "greater than"
symbol (>).
Likewise &lt; is the "less than" symbol (<).

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/sgml/entities.html

Thanks. That makes sense. Now I just need to figure out why the <
and > are being translated...

Thanks for your help.

 

[Jonathan N. Little]

They have shown up in script-generated html code and they are screwing
up my html display. Anyone have any clue as to where I could begin
looking? The script just generates html like this:

echo "<TR><TD>$PROC_1 - $PROC_1_CURRENT instances running</TD><TD>" >>
$BBTMP/$TEST

and somehow these "&gt;&lt" characters are being inserted, or
misunderstood from somewhere...

any advice?

Thanks,

the colonel

Well the '&gt;' is the HTML entity for 'greater than' character '>'. The
'&lt' would be the 'less than' entity '<' if it had the required
trailing ';' semicolon.

 

[Oli Filth]

Thanks. That makes sense. Now I just need to figure out why the <
and > are being translated...

Well, whatever program you're using is doing it automatically for you.

It's necessary because otherwise the browser's HTML parser would see a
"<", for instance, and think that that's the start of an HTML tag and
possibly screw up. Writing it as &lt; makes it explicit that you want to
display a "<" symbol to the user. Same logic applies to &gt;, &amp;,
&quot;, and others.

 

[David Håsäther]

The '&lt' would be the 'less than' entity '<' if it had the
required trailing ';' semicolon.

In SGML, a Reference Close (";") is not required to end an entity
reference. Any non name character will also terminate the parsing, as
will the record end character.
In XML though, entity references must end with ";".