Convert characters "<" (less than) and ">" (greater than) to HTML entities in PHP

Description

The following code shows how to convert characters "<" (less than) and ">" (greater than) to HTML entities.

Example

  /*from   www  .  j  a v a 2s . c  o  m*/
<?php
   $str = "This is some <b>bold</b> text.";
   echo htmlspecialchars($str);
?>

The code above generates the following result.