Syntax error, '>' expected in Sitecore CMS

When I was a developer in a large corporation before, I was assigned to a Sitecore CMS project. While working on the CMS's services in getting the contents, I encountered an error as mentioned in a title post.

After doing some research, I found out that the CMS's parser does not recognize special characters of the data returned from it's search query.

So the workaround that I found from an article was to surround the data returned with hash tags.
In the sample codes below, I just added a snippet to insert hashtags to data returned from the parser.

Sample Data Returned: Tel-Aviv
Formatted data: #Tel-Aviv#

Original method:

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public static IEnumerable<IUniversity> GetSchoolsByState(Guid stateProvinceId, Language languageVersion) { if (stateProvinceId.Equals(Guid.Empty)) return null; var stateProvinceReferenceItem = Context.Database.GetItem(ID.Parse(stateProvinceId)); if (stateProvinceReferenceItem == null) return null; return GetSchoolsByStateProvince(stateProvinceReferenceItem.Paths.Path, languageVersion); }

Modified Method:

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public static IEnumerable<IUniversity> GetSchoolsByState(Guid stateProvinceId, Language languageVersion) { if (stateProvinceId.Equals(Guid.Empty)) return null; var stateProvinceReferenceItem = Context.Database.GetItem(ID.Parse(stateProvinceId)); if (stateProvinceReferenceItem == null) return null; //added code fix var path = stateProvinceReferenceItem.Paths.Path; if (path.Substring(path.LastIndexOf("/", StringComparison.Ordinal)).Split(new string[] { "-" }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries).Length > 1) { path = path.Insert(path.LastIndexOf("/", StringComparison.Ordinal) + 1, "#"); path = path.Insert(path.Length, "#"); return GetSchoolsByStateProvince(path, languageVersion); } return GetSchoolsByStateProvince(stateProvinceReferenceItem.Paths.Path, languageVersion); }