What does \u003C mean?

I'm looking at twitter's javascript file, and I see this in the templates hash:

Browse Interests{{/i}}\u003C/a\u003E\n        \u003C/li\u003E\n  {{#logged_in}}\n

What do those codes represent?

Solution 1:

It's a unicode character. In this case \u003C and \u003E mean :

U+003C < Less-than sign

U+003E > Greater-than sign

See a list here

Solution 2:

That is a unicode character code that, when parsed by JavaScript as a string, is converted into its corresponding character (JavaScript automatically converts any occurrences of \uXXXX into the corresponding Unicode character). For example, your example would be:

Browse Interests{{/i}}</a>\n        </li>\n  {{#logged_in}}\n

As you can see, \u003C changes into < (less-than sign) and \u003E changes into > (greater-than sign).

In addition to the link posted by Raynos, this page from the Unicode website lists a lot of characters (so many that they decided to annoyingly group them) and this page has a (kind of) nice index.

Solution 3:

It is a unicode char \u003C = <

Solution 4:

Those are unicode escapes. The general unicode escapes looks like \uxxxx where xxxx are the hexadecimal digits of the ASCI characters. They are used mainly to insert special characters inside a javascript string.