Store <# chars in XML?

is it possible to store <# characters in xml for a node? I know that these maybe invalid characters for XML (makes it unreadable) but is there a way of doing this so it can read the xml correctly? Perhaps what I am doing is incorrect, I dont know.

<myNode>hi <#fieldname#></myNode>

Replace < with &lt;
> is legal in an XML node, but it's still probably good to replace it with &gt;

# should be legal, are you having a problem with #?

yeh i did. I'll give the suggestion a shot, perhaps that was conflicting the #.