Which charset is '<'? [closed]

Question

I found this character in my phpbb database: <. Which charset is?

I'm on MySQL, and I have PhpBB and phpmyadmin. The code shows <.

Answer 1

Those are HTML Special Characters. You can get full list of them here. It doesn't have much to do with charset.

Answer 2

That's not a charset, it is a character entity reference.

That's an escaping method known in HTML and XML (where ampersands may have special meaning).

The charset and encoding could still be anything (such as ASCII7, UTF8 or latin1, or basically anything else, since &amps; can be expressed in any modern character set).