Filtering with HTML entities

Hi there,

I tried asking this question a very long time ago, but got no responses, so I'm trying again since I still haven't found a solution.

I have a table where one column has text that looks something like this:

<some text
<some other text

I know it's weird to use < here, but our system uses it to define types of addresses (< is hospitals).

My problem is that when I type < in the filtering input box, no results show up. However, if I type &lt; it works. I'm fetching the data from a JSON file, where the text is written like this, so that makes sense:

<some text
<some other text

When I change it to not using the HTML entity, no results show up at all because the browser interprets the < as a beginning HTML tag. I've also tried with the unicode character \u003c, but that's the same thing.

Any ideas as to how I can both show the tag and search in rows containing it?