A developer wrote some code that tries to extract text that looks like HTML tags. So if you have <h1>, <div> etc in your text, he was basically just deleting the HTML prior to saving it to the database.
The thing is, the code just looked for a “<” then a “>” and removed everything between. So if you had a sentence like “the value is ❤ and >1”, then run that through his code, the returned value would be “the value is 1” which has a completely different meaning. You could have paragraphs of text between these characters, and his code would just delete it.
Not sure why he decided to hand-craft his own solution. There will be more official ways of encoding HTML.
Stranger Coding Tings 