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

Question

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.

Answer 1

\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}