These commands are encased in left and right carets, like this: < command >.*
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They are NOT carets. They are angle-brackets. This is a caret: ^ (shift 6).
Incidentally, some other websites, such as in discussion forums, use the square brackets, "[" and "]", rather than the angle brackets, "<" and ">" to do HTML.
[bbcode]bbcode[/bbcode]
BB stands for bulletin board which is an old version of a forum.