Given lack of clarity in OP and the possibility that the OP is trying to convey the notion of word boundaries, it seems fair to ask:

sandy1028: do you mean text which actually includes literal instances of backslash followed by a greater_than or less_than sign? (and what sort of textual material uses such a notation?)

...or did you use well-intentioned (but incorrect, see CountZero's and cdarke's notes above) code notation in the title and text?
...or do you mean something else entirely?

Note that most of the regexen assume OP unnecessarily backwhacked < and > in confusion over Perl's regex syntax; if the text does indeed include sequences like those shown in OP and greater_than or less_than symbols which are not preceded by backslashes, you will have to modify the regexen to:

• use alternate delimiters (such as m!/[<>]!
• escape the backslashes.

and, just BTW, since I don't see it mentioned elsewhere (...cleans coke bottle lenses), your /i modifier is useless: case insensitivity is not a relevant concept for the chars you discuss.

hth