I have a pre element with some html code in it.
the code has special characters in it, like <, so it doesn't break the page.

Then I have a javascript function that gets the contents of this pre element, highlights it (with codemirror), and replaces the element contents with the highlighted text.

I'm using $(pre).append(...); to do this.
The problem is that after the highlighting, on the screen I see < instead of <.
How can I convert these characters back to html?