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?
6 Answers
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
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.
It is a unicode char \u003C = <
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.
Unicode all starts with \u e.g. \u0001
In JavaScript
unescape("\u003c")
to decode the unicode
Although unescape() is not strictly deprecated (as in "removed from the Web standards")
