Handling the String with <> characters

Question

I am trying to convert the Long Area Text in to the RTF Field, the long text area sometime has the the <> in between the texts which is treated as a markup. I tried below to escape the characters like below

        newArticle.Article_Body_Long_T__c = result.SolutionNote;
        String rep = newArticle.Article_Body_Long_T__c.replaceAll('<', '\<');
        rep = newArticle.Article_Body_Long_T__c.replaceAll('>', '\>');
        newArticle.SOP_Article_Body__c = rep.replaceAll('\n', '<br/>');

But it throws error like Illegal string literal: Invalid string literal '\<'. Illegal character sequence \<' in string literal. I want the <> braces retained in the RTF and cannot replace them with the '' empty string. Please let me how I can I handle this

Answer 1

The \ character is an escape character in Apex. If you wanted it to be a literal backslash in the resulting string, you'd have to double up on it: \\. However, this won't work the way you expect, as the characters need to be escaped in HTML. Use escapeHtml4() to do this:

    newArticle.Article_Body_Long_T__c = result.SolutionNote.escapeHtml4();

Or, to remove them entirely:

    newArticle.Article_Body_Long_T__c = result.SolutionNote.stripHtmlTags();

Note that if <br/> is used, you'll lose the line breaks in the resulting text, so you may need to do additional replacements.