Which Characters Should Be Escaped Inside A “pre” tag?

The <pre> tag defines pre-formatted text. Everything (generally, text and code snippets) in a <pre> tag element is displayed in a fixed-width font, and preserves both spaces and line breaks in them. In other words, if anyone wants to show their code snippets on a web page, they can simply enclose their code in the tag.

But there are certain things which most of people completely miss. There are some reserved characters in the <pre> tag. Reserved characters are those characters that are meant to serve a specific or reserved purpose. So here is the list of all the reserved character that should also be escaped while writing the code inside it:

Less Than (<)
Greater Than (>)
Ampersand (&)
Single Quote or Apostrophe (‘)
Double Quotes (“)

As already mentioned there are some reserved characters in <pre> tag. These characters have a specific meaning and if we put these characters inside our <pre> tag, it will treat them as a reserved character, and hence, we need to escape them.

Less Than (<): It is reserved for use in tags (as in <div></div>). Thus, this character will have this specific meaning only. To escape them in <pre> tag tag, we need to use < for HTML entity name or < for HTML entity number as a replacement.
Greater Than(>): It is reserved for use in tags (as in <body></body>). Thus, this character will have this specific meaning only. To escape them in pre tag, we need to use > for HTML entity name or > for HTML entity number as a replacement.
Ampersand(&): It is reserved for entities such as   which is the HTML entity name for non-breaking space. Thus, it will have that reserved meaning for the whole text inside pre tag. To escape them in pre tag, we need to use & for HTML entity name or & for HTML entity number as a replacement.
Single Quote or Apostrophe (‘): It is reserved for defining values to the attributes such as <div float:’left’> </div> and thus, will correspond to that meaning only in the whole code between pre tag. To escape them in pre tag, we need to use ' for HTML entity number as a replacement as this does not have any HTML entity name.
Double Quotes (“): It is again reserved for defining values to the attributes such as <div class:”title”> </div> and thus, will correspond to that meaning only in the whole code between pre tag. To escape them in pre tag, we need to use " for HTML entity name or " for HTML entity number as a replacement.

Example:

<!DOCTYPE html> 

<html> 

<head> 

    <title>Page Title</title> 

</head> 

<body> 

    <center> 

        <h2 style="color: green;">GeeksforGeeks</h2> 

        <p>A Computer Science Portal for Geeks</p> 

        <pre> 

    <h2>GeeksforGeeks</h2> 

    <p>A Computer Science Portal for Geeks</p> 

</pre> 

    </center> 

</body> 

</html>