HTML: show > in plain text - html

In HTML files, if I want the browser to show a special symbol, such as >, I can use the special escape character sequence > and the browser will automatically transform it to >.
But what if I don't want it to be transferred into >? What if I happen to want the character sequence to be shown in plain text?

In order to have a character sequence not automatically rendered as a symbol, you can escape out the ampersand. This method is commonly used by instructional pages with lists of HTML symbols.
Source: >
Result: >
Source: >
Result: >

Thanks to Ry-♦ for stating the obvious. I was so concerned about using raw string, I didn't realize what I was using is adequate already. Use .textContent property to render text as is. If you use something like .innerHTML, it will parse your text as HTML and apply escape sequences.
Demo
var str = ">"
document.querySelector('body').textContent = str;

Related

How do I type html in a markdown file without it rendering?

I want to type the following sentence in a markdown file: she says <h1> is large. I can do it in StackOverflow with three backticks around h1, but this doesn't work for a .md file. I've also tried a single backtick, single quote, double quote, hashtags, spacing, <code>h1</code> and everything else I could think of. Is there a way to do this?
You can escape the < characters by replacing them with <, which is the HTML escape sequence for <. You're sentence would then be:
she says <h1> is large
As a side note, the original Markdown "spec" has the following to say:
However, inside Markdown code spans and blocks, angle brackets and ampersands are always encoded automatically. This makes it easy to use Markdown to write about HTML code. (As opposed to raw HTML, which is a terrible format for writing about HTML syntax, because every single < and & in your example code needs to be escaped.)
...which means that, if you're still getting tags when putting them in backticks, whatever renderer you're using isn't "compliant" (to the extent that one can be compliant with that document), and you might want to file a bug.
Generally, you can surround the code in single backticks to automatically escape the characters. Otherwise just use the HTML escapes for < <and > >.
i.e.
she says <h1> is large or she says `<h1>` is large
A backslash (\) can be used to escape < and >.
Ex: she says <h1> is large
P.S. See this answer's source by clicking Edit.

Why can't HTML contain a NUL character? (converted to 0xFFFD / "%EF%BF%BD")

For a special value, I've tried the HTML <option value="">unspecified</option>, but it seems that the NUL character is not interpreted in HTML. I'm getting �. I'd like to know why, and what other unusual UTF-8 characters besides NUL I may have to watch out for.
Here's a fiddle to demonstrate what I'm talking about.
<select><option value=""></option></select>
As you can see above, the dropdown is setup with NUL values, but they are converted to � when JavaScript inspects the results.
var select = document.querySelector('select')
inspect()
select.options[0].value = '\u0000'
select.options[0].label = '\u0000'
inspect()
select.innerHTML = select.innerHTML
inspect()
function inspect() {
alert(encodeURIComponent(select.options[0].value)
+ ','
+ encodeURIComponent(select.options[0].label)
+ ','
+ select.innerHTML)
}
JavaScript can specifically set value and label to \u0000 and it works, but for some reason this is not able to be rendered in the HTML.
Can you explain why and/or point to the relevant documentation? Are there other UTF-8 characters that will be substituted in a similar manner?
There's a character reference override table in the HTML5 spec for the mapping of character references. The first of these is for 
This is followed by some prose stating that numbers in the range 0xD800 to 0xDFFF or greater than 0x10FFFF are also mapped to the Unicode replacement character.
NUL is invalid. HTML is a text based document. Only character strings may be entered.
https://developers.whatwg.org/elements.html#attributes
Except where otherwise specified, attributes on HTML elements may have
any string value, including the empty string. Except where explicitly
stated, there is no restriction on what text can be specified in such
attributes.

How to avoid <> in HTML?

I would like to paste into my HTML code a phrase
"<car>"
and I would like that this word "car" will be between <>. In some text will be
"<car>"
and this is not a HTML expression. The problem is that when I put it the parser think that this is the HTML syntax how to avoid it. Is there any expression which need to be between this?
replace < by < and > by >
Live on JSFiddle.
< and > are special characters, more special characters in HTML you can find here.
More about HTML entities you can find here.
use > for > and < for <
$gt;car<
you need to use special character .. To know more about Special Character link here
CODE:
<p>"<car >"</p>
OUTPUT:
"<car>"
< = < less than
> = > greater than
The same applies for XML too. Take a look here, special characters for HTML.
If you really want LESS THAN SIGN “<” to appear visibly in page content, write it as &, so that it will not be treated as starting a tag. Ref.: 5.3.2 Character entity references in HTML 4.01.
So you would write
<car>
If you like, you can write “>” as > for symmetry, but there is no need to.
But if you really want to put something in angle brackets, e.g. using a mathematical notation, rather than a markup notation (as in HTML and XML), consider using U+27E8 MATHEMATICAL LEFT ANGLE BRACKET “⟨” and U+27E9 MATHEMATICAL RIGHT ANGLE BRACKET “⟩”. They cause no problems to HTML markup, as they are not markup-significant. If you don’t know how to type them in your authoring environment, you can use character references for them:
⟨car⟩
This would result in ⟨car⟩, though as always with less common special characters, you would need to consider character (font) problems.
You can use the "greater than" and "less than" entities:
<car>
The W3C, the organization responsible for setting web standards, has some pretty good documentation on HTML entities. They consist of an ampersand followed by an entity name followed by a semicolon (&name;) or an ampersand followed by a pound sign followed by an entity number followed by a semicolon (&#number;). The link I provided has a table of common HTML entities.

Escape HTML tags and print code to screen

I want the following to be displayed on the screen: < / develop >
However, when I try to place it in my html, it is interpreted as an end tag.
How do I escape regular html tags and write these characters as text to be printed to the screen?
Using HTML Entities:
</developer>
ref: http://www.htmlentities.com/html/entities/
HTML has reserved special characters, so you you use the appropriate HTML entity to emit them to the screen. It can also be useful when you are trying to print out characters outside of the normal ASCII set and you want to be assured they will render correctly irrespective of the browser's character encoding setting.
Like so:
< /develop>

How does the browser distinguish between escaped strings and actual HTML when both are displayed similarly?

If I place <a href="www.stackoverflow.com"> inside the body tag, and if I place the following string inside the body tag "<a href="www.stackoverflow.com">", how does the browser know that the first is to be rendered as an actual link, and the latter as simple text ?
The less than character “<” is defined to be a tag start character. The notation < is something completely different; it simply means the less than character as a data character, not interpreted as markup at all. So the answer is really “By definition.”
By the way, href="www.stackoverflow.com" contains a relative address, resolved relative to the current base address. To refer to StackOverflow main page, you need to write href="http://www.stackoverflow.com".
If we uses reserved characters/ HTML tags in our html pages they are rendered as markups by the borwsers.Some times we are in need to use these charcatres as itself not as markups then we have to use some escape sequences to achive them.
you can get a good idea of how browsers work from this link.
you can find some escape sequences from here
In our case <a href="www.stackoverflow.com"> in that < and > are a reserved charcter by html when ever it uses in the page its rendered as an html tag but if you want to use or display < or > in your page you have to use coresponding escape sequence. thats how browsers replaces the < as < and displayed in the page