How do I escape characters in C# comments?

I realized today that I don't know how to escape characters in comments for C#. I want to document a generic C# class, but I cannot write a proper example since I don't know how to escape the < and > characters. Do I have to use < and >? I don't like if that is the case since I want to make it easy to read the comment in the actual document so I don't have to generate some kind of code document to be able to read the example code.

Solution 1:

If you need to escape characters in XML comments, you need to use the character entities, so < would need to be escaped as <, as in your question.

The alternative to escaping is using CDATA sections, to the same effect.

As you noted, this would produce good looking documentation, but a horrible comment to read...

Solution 2:

In plain C# comments you can use any character (except */ if you started the comment with /*, or the newline character if you started the comment with //). If you are using XML comments then you can use a CDATA section to include '<' and '>' characters.

See this MSDN blog article for more information on XML comments in C#.

For example

/// <summary>
/// Here is how to use the class: <![CDATA[ <test>Data</test> ]]>
/// </summary>