`<` sign rendered as beginning of new HTML element

I’ve been looking online and checked the documentation, but I found nothing on this issue.

It might be no issue though. I’m placing the C++ code inside the

<pre>
    <code>
        #include <stdio.h>
    </code>
</pre>

And in the HTML it’s rendered as

#include

and when inspect the code it looks like the new HTML element is created

<span class="hljs-meta">
    #
    <span class="hljs-meta-keyword">include</span>
</span>
<stdio.h></stdio.h>

Am I doing something wrong? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks

Browser: Chrome Version 47.0.2526.73 (64-bit)

[isagalaev]

<pre> in HTML doesn’t mean that text inside it will be auto escaped. This is in fact a common misconception. If highlight.js were to suddenly interpret tags inside <pre> literally, it would be a) quite surprising to people who do know how it works and b) would prevent people from having custom markup inside it. For example, right now you can do something like:

<pre>
...
<span style="background: red"></span>
</pre>

That wouldn’t be possible if we would autoescape it.

Also, you’re supposed to pre-escape any text you want to put inside HTML anyway for security purposes. It would be really cumbersome to force people who do it do something like if (it's a "pre" tag && highlight.js is active) { unescape text back }.

[josx]

Clearly I understand how to escape chars to html entities, but from my perspective if highlight.js forces to use <pre> tags in browser, it need to support out of the box this feature.