Hi,

My <operator> tag in XML can take any of the following values:

"<", ">", and "<>"

I enter the data this way in the xml:

<operator>&lt;</operator>
<operator>&gt;</operator>

This works fine for the first two.

1) How do I enter "<>" as data in the xml document?  I tried
<operator>&gt;&lt;</operator>, but that only reads the first value,
i.e. "<".

2) After parsing the field, I need to match the data to the content of
an List, and return the matched index:

XML tag:
--------
<OPERATOR>&lt;</OPERATOR>

This is the method
------------------

List operatorList = Arrays.asList("<>", "&lt;&gt;", "&lt;" ,"<", "&gt;"
,">");

public void setOperator(String operator){
  System.out.println("operator sent" + " ----> " + operator);
  System.out.println("operator index" + " ----> " +
operatorList.indexOf(operator));
}

Method Output:
---------------

operator sent ----> <
operator index ----> -1

It is unable to find either "<" or ">" in my list, I can't understand
why?

3) However when I try this:

if(operator.equals("<"))
System.out.println("received <");

It prints out "received <" correctly.

Can someone please clarify?

Thank you,
Rohit.