<pre>: The Preformatted Text element - HTML

`Escaping ambiguous characters`

Suppose you want to demonstrate HTML code in a

 element. The character sequences that define valid HTML tags (starting with < and ending with >) will not be displayed. To display the tag characters as text, you need to escape (at least) the < character using its character reference, so that the sequences no longer define valid tags.
In reality, the HTML parser treats most characters as plain text unless in specific contexts. For example, < code is fine, but  would be misparsed; &am; is fine, but & is not. However, it's a good practice to escape all ambiguous characters to avoid any confusion, especially if you are programmatically generating HTML and injecting the 
 content. In this case, here's a good rule of thumb for how to escape characters:

First, write the content out, as you would like it to appear in the HTML document.
Replace any ampersands (&) with &. Do this step first, so that new & characters generated in the next step don't get escaped.
Replace any < characters with <.

This should result in the content being displayed as you intended. The replacement of other HTML syntax characters is optional (like > to >, " to ", and ' to '), but will do no harm.
HTML
html

let i = 5;

if (i < 10 && i > 0)
  return "Single Digit Number"


Result

`Technical summary`

Content categories	Flow content, palpable content.
Permitted content	Phrasing content.
Tag omission	None, both the starting and ending tag are mandatory.
Permitted parents	Any element that accepts flow content.
Implicit ARIA role	`generic`
Permitted ARIA roles	Any
DOM interface	`HTMLPreElement`

`Specifications`

Specification
HTML # the-pre-element

See also CSS: white-space, word-break Character reference Related element: , , Help improve MDN Was this page helpful to you? Learn how to contribute.This page was last modified on Apr 10, 2025 by MDN contributors. View this page on GitHub • Report a problem with this content