Ampersand character in OBX segment causing problems - HL7 formatting

Question

There are html equivalents for ">" and "<" ("<" and ">") in the OBX-5 field which is causing the Terser.get(..) method to only fetch the characters up to the ampersand character. The encoding characters in MSH-2 are "^~\&". Is the terser.get(..) failing because there's an encoding character in the OBX-5 field? Is there a way to change these characters to ">" and "<" easily?

Thanks a lot for your help.