Treating < and > as synonyms for the curly braces { and }

I am exporting photo metadata from a software which seems to be unable to export curly braces correctly. Is there any way to tell LaTeX to treat < as {, and > as }, to keep me from having to go through the file manually? In the back of my head I have cat-codes in mind but never used them so far.

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it might be easier to write a script which fixes the data formatting, and not have to redefine things in LaTeX, but that's not what you asked. – Joe Mar 6 '12 at 6:42

\catcode\<=1
\catcode\>=2


does what you ask although you might find some parts of LaTeX are not expecting to find < and > redefined like that.

Constructs such as \ifnum\tempdim<5pt fail if < is not < but you don't normally find those mid document so switch catcodes after begin{document} perhaps by making your application write out just the main body of the document without the preamble and then have a document with normal syntax that looks like

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{amssymb,amsmath}
\begin{document}

\input{file-with-anglebrackets}

\end{document}

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Does this leave math-related operators untouched? – Werner Mar 5 '12 at 19:25
@Werner well you can do $\left\langle \frac<1><2> \right\rangle$ but not $\left< \frac<1><2> \right>$ if that's what you mean – David Carlisle Mar 5 '12 at 19:33
This is partly what I meant, but good to know. I was referring to x > y which I guess has to be replaced with x \gt y. – Werner Mar 5 '12 at 19:35
@UweZiegenhagen, I'm adding some note to the answer, too long for comment – David Carlisle Mar 5 '12 at 19:38
I helped myself by just exporting CSV and using datatool. I contacted the author of the Lightroom plugin, it would be great to have it export LaTeX directly. – Uwe Ziegenhagen Mar 5 '12 at 20:41