<
Less than (or open angled bracket)
PrintableASCII 60 | Hex 0x3C | U+003C
ASCII 60 is the less-than comparison operator in virtually every programming language. In HTML and XML, it opens a tag, making it a reserved character that must be escaped as < in text content. Forgetting this escape is a direct path to cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities in web applications. The C++ standard library uses << as the stream insertion operator (cout << x), overloading the left bitwise shift operator for I/O.
ASCII Code
Decimal
60
Hexadecimal
0x3C
Octal
74
Binary
0011 1100
URL Escape
%3C
Unicode
Code Point
U+003C
Escape
\u003c
UTF-8 Hex
0x3C
UTF-8 Binary
00111100
UTF-16
0x003C
UTF-32
0x0000003C
HTML Entities
Numeric
<
Hex
<
Named
<
How to Type
Windows Alt CodeAlt + 60
HTML Entity
<
Unicode InputU+003C
Source Code Representations
C / Java
"\u003C"CSS
\003CJavaScript
"\u003C"Perl
\x{003C}Python 2
u"\u003C"Python 3
\u003CRuby
\u{003C}Frequently Asked Questions
What is ASCII code 60?
ASCII code 60 represents the Less than (or open angled bracket) character. In hexadecimal it is 0x3C, in binary 0011 1100, and in octal 74. It is a printable character that appears as "<" in text.
How do I type ASCII 60 on a keyboard?
On Windows, hold Alt and type 60 on the numeric keypad. On Mac, you can use the Character Viewer (Edit > Emoji & Symbols). In HTML, use the entity < or <.