Remove Less Than Sign from Text

The less than sign (<) is the primary character used to open HTML and XML tags, comparison operators in programming, and angle brackets in various data formats. You may need to remove it when sanitizing user-submitted content to prevent XSS attacks, cleaning up raw HTML snippets so they display as plain text, preparing data for import into systems that treat it as a reserved character, or stripping markup from exported content before further processing.

No. This tool focuses solely on removing the less than sign (<) and leaves all other characters completely untouched — including the greater than sign (>), punctuation, spaces, and any other special characters in your text. If you also need to remove the greater than sign, you can use our dedicated Greater Than Remover tool for that purpose.

Yes, completely. All processing happens locally inside your browser using JavaScript — your text is never transmitted to any server, logged, or stored in any way. This makes it safe to use even with sensitive content like raw HTML source code, private XML data, internal logs, or confidential documents that contain the less than character.

Yes. Cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks typically rely on injecting HTML or JavaScript tags into a webpage, and every tag starts with a less than sign (<). Stripping it from user input is a basic but effective manual sanitization step that prevents tag injection from being interpreted by the browser. For production applications, always combine this with server-side validation and proper HTML encoding, but this tool is a fast way to clean content manually before use.

Partially. Since every HTML tag opens with a less than sign (<), removing it breaks the tag structure and prevents browsers from rendering it as markup. However, the closing greater than sign (>) and the tag content itself will still remain in the text. For a complete HTML strip, use both this tool and our Greater Than Remover together, or use a dedicated HTML tag stripper tool for a cleaner result.

Yes. Since the tool runs entirely in your browser, it is not subject to any server-side file size or rate restrictions. You can paste hundreds or thousands of lines — such as bulk HTML exports, XML data dumps, raw code snippets, or large log files — and the tool will process and clean everything instantly without any upload delay or slowdown.