How to quote in HTML (not blockquote)?

Question

I want to some sample code in a html page. How do I do it, for example I want to show a tag and image tag, in stackoverflow I use 4 spaces:

A Tag example:
<a href="your_url"></a>

Image Tag example:
<img...>

Answer 1

To format the output, you can use the pre element.

Howver, you will still need to turn the special characters < > ' " & into their HTML entities < > and so on so the HTML tags turn up in clear text and don't get rendered by the browser.

If you can use PHP, there is htmlspecialchars() for that. Every server-side scripting language has an equivalent of it.

In JavaScript, setting the innerText property of the pre container leads to the characters being displayed literally and not as interpreted HTML.

If you want to do it manually, this is what you need to convert:

& to &
> to >
< to &lt;
" to &quot;
' to &#039

source

Answer 2

I think you're asking for the <pre> tag for preformatted text.

Everything that goes inside the pre tag it's not interpreted.

Try this on a browser:

<pre>
&lt;img src="whatever" /&gt;
&lt;othertag&gt;whatever&lt;/otherta&gt;
</pre>

EDIT: As Pekka pointed out, for HTML tags, symbols must be converted to their HTML entities.