is < the only meta character you filter?

the others from my last message showed up ok.

>>argh I give up. there is just no good reason for you to wholesale blow away meta characters. There are things other than PRE tags involved in the bigger picture of using meta characters in messages.
>
>This need to be within PRE tag. Thus, our parser can know how to display it. Otherwise, this will be interpreted and this will cause problems.