@sterndata,
Thanks Steve but I had already tried that and it did not work. I wish you would not have edited my second post because it was fine before but your changes broke the escape code for the HTML bracket in the shortcode, so now if the questioner copies what you correct in either of my replies then it will not work.
Personally I think this is a huge issue that WordPress needs to address on two fronts. As a moderator I would like your help to escalate the issue of not being able to post what you mean to say on the forums when you are needing to illustrate how to escape HTML brackets. This will be hard to explain on the forum because it is that very thing that I cannot post that I want you to see but I think I can convey the problem like this:
If you want to show someone how to type the escape code for the HTML brackets ( i.e. < and > ) then you would use the & character followed by either lt; or gt; respectively. However, if you type this together like < (I just typed ” $ l t ; ” without the quotes or spaces) then it will just show up on the forums like this < as you see from this post. so, though a lot of trial and error I was able to get it to display properly by double escaping (escaping the first & in the escape) like this < (what I really typed here was & a m p ; l t ; again without those spaces) but this does not work at all when i wrap it in the CODE tag so that is why I did not do that, and that is why you effectively broke my example when you did that to what I had finally gotten to display right.
The other side of this, and the reason I have to try to talk about this issue on the forums at all, is that one cannot effectively place any HTML inside a shortcode parameter without it braking the and automatically adding ending tags for the bits of html that were not meant to be displayed at all but were just supposed to be part of a shortcode parameter.