Should I use HTML codes or not for braces and brackets?

[Alessandra Kelley]

I'm formatting someone else's science fiction novel for the Kindle (using HTML).

One of the characters has a very alien, simultaneous, fractal thought process, written as nested phrases enclosed in curly braces ({}) and square brackets ([]).

While [] and {} don't mess up HTML (which uses angled brackets, <>), I am a little concerned about them because of their use in programming.

Would it be better to replace the braces and brackets with their equivalent HTML codes (i.e. [ for [ and so on)? Or am I being too fussy?

Edit: Whoops -- my HTML code got replaced with a [ . Well, it started with a & and ended with a ; and was a number beginning with a #.

[davidw]

You could just use the 'real things' and if it doesn't look good on the Kindle (you have an actual device to test on, right?) you could just do a global search and replace to fix things up.

[Medievalist]

Those are ASCII characters; you should be fine.