gtk-aschmidt

*all the characters of “&-g-t-;”

*all the characters of “>”

Two \\ didn’t work, either. Numeric entities got closer, but the < and the > always ended up being interpreted in the formatting string. Maybe I wasn’t imaginative enough (I never tried numerically encoding all the characters of “>”, for example)….

Multiple “[start-custom]” tags ended up being perfectly fine for what I needed, though, and far easier to read in the long run than the formatting string escapes, so I’m perfectly happy.

I’m using the php date format inside the calendar feed setting in the admin dashboard.

It isn’t a “hack” as such. It’s supposed to be the way you output literal characters inside a formatting string in a PHP date string. It’s in the documentation.

It looks, though, like I can do this to do what I want:

[start-custom format="M"]<span>[start-custom format="j"]</span>

…to get what I need. It’s probably also easier for someone to look at and say “Oh, that’s what it does.”