thank you danny k and togo, never mind about the typos togo, i suppose you were doing it on a mobile phone and the fingers were bigger than the keys!! it could happen to anyone, however, i am grateful to you both for taking the trouble to explain, it is abundantly clear and of course the usual response, why didn't i work that out!!
sorry about that togo, i don't know anything about ps's mine is an imac, somewhere on the imac there is a way to bring up those symbols but i am not sure how
It's not a typo- it's an AB feature: AB doesn't accept the greater than and less than signs (forward/backward arrow)- it just stops the post at that point