Force S123 to treat text question as string literal?

[JamieBougher]

I have a survey where users regularly need to type "less than one foot" in a text question. Most of them abbreviate this phrase as "<1'". I have a new user who was trying to abbreviate as "<FT" and found that he could not submit his surveys. It would return error code 10583, "A value passed for the field 'notes' is invalid."

I did some searching for that error code, which was how I narrowed it down to being an issue with the < specifically. After some more testing, it turns out (and in retrospect I am not surprised by this) that < followed immediately by any letter except b, i , o, p, s, or u will result in the same failure. If there is a space between the < and the letter, the survey sends successfully, and it is also successful followed by any non-alphabetic character.

Since the default behavior of text questions is to allow the interpretation of a subset of HTML tags in them, this makes sense. I've made use of that functionality in other surveys to display formatted messages to users.

What's frustrating is that when the <+letter combination does not match with one of the supported HTML tags, the survey fails to send instead of just treating the <+letter as a string.

I can use regex in the constraint column to give my users a warning if they have an angle bracket next to an alphabetic character, but what I'd really like to do is tell Survey123 to treat the input of the question as a string literal, and not attempt to interpret any part of it as HTML. I have not found any documentation suggesting this is possible, but I was wondering if anyone knows of an option like this for S123? Thanks!

[Ehei_Dogen]

Just a couple ideas off the top of my head...

Don't give users a free form text entry. Use a selection question type instead, with a dropdown or radio button, or similar. Stop the problem before it occurs.
Use the calculation or format field to separate the '<' from any immediately following character.
Add a hint instructing users not to do this.

The only free form text questions I use are comments. Don't underestimate the ways users can get around 'foolproof'. I used to have users enter their usernames manually, and one guy entered at least 14 different variations of his username.

[TylerGraham2]

The problem with fool proofing something is that they always build a better fool.

I agree though, make them use a button or a choice. You could also do it as a select_multiple question and just have a single choice "less than 1 foot", it will show up as a check box (which my brain likes more than a single choice radio button)

[Neal-Kittelson]

What is being added in that field the times when it is not "< 1 ft"? If it is a measurement, and a select_one or select_multiple doesn't work for the rest of your scenario.  You could look at constraining the entries, by making the field type an "integer" or "decimal" type with a input mask, and have a separate box for "< 1 ft" scenario as @TylerGraham2 suggests.