I was curious if there was some way to auto-convert < to < as well as tags like this in general instead of manually doing this, from an end user perspective.

:| You don't say :/

perl -pe "%f = qw{ < &lt; > &gt; }; s{[^><]\K([><])([^\w])}{ $f{$1}$2}
+g; " < in > out
[download]

naturally, untested, doesn't work :/

I'm not surprised. \K was added in perl 5.10 but with -e perl won't use any features that are so "recent". Try "-E" instead, at least, if you have perl 5.10 or later.

But, I don't think it will work, anyway. /([><])([^\w])/ would fix every "</" in your XML, and that just isn't right.