If you put a literal left angle-bracket into a tweet, it is rendered as the characters 'ampersand', 'l', 't', and 'semicolon', which is reasonable. However, if you put that sequence of characters into a tweet--'ampersand', 'l', 't', and 'semicolon'--then they are rendered literally. Therefore, it is impossible to correctly decode a tweet. You should be encoding literal ampersands as 'ampersand', 'a', 'm', 'p', 'semicolon'.
In other words, either encode the whole tweet, or none of it, when providing tweets as data. Thanks.
