Print less-than and greater-than symbols in PHP

Question

I am have troubles trying to print out < > symbols in HTML using PHP.

I am appending a string "<machine>" to a variable.

Example:

$output .= " <machine> ";
echo $output;

I tried using escapes, but that didn't help. Any advice?

Answer 1

> = >
< = <

Or you can use htmlspecialchars.

$output .= htmlspecialchars(" <machine> ");

Answer 2

If you are outputting HTML, you cannot just use < and > : you must use the corresponding HTML entities : < and >

If you have a string in PHP and want to automatically replace those characters by the corresponding HTML entities, you'll be interested by the htmlspecialchars() function (quoting) :

The translations performed are:

• '&' (ampersand) becomes '&'
• '"' (double quote) becomes '"' when ENT_NOQUOTES is not set.
• "'" (single quote) becomes ''' only when ENT_QUOTES is set.
• '<' (less than) becomes '<'
• '>' (greater than) becomes '>'

In your case, a portion of code like this one :

$output = " ";

echo htmlspecialchars($output, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');

Would get you the following HTML code as output :

 <machine> 

And, just in case, if you want to encode more characters, you should take a look at the htmlentities() function.