Is there something better than just putting it in an ordinary message? And do I have to go through and escape lots of special characters when I do that?

Putting code fragments in messages is standard practice here. Surround the code with a <code> .. </code> tag pair, and HTML entities with the code will be handled automagically.

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Startup cost, CGI performance by dws
in thread Startup cost, CGI performance by dd-b

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


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