HTML Character Escaping

Dear All,
I'm facing an issue. We have a text box in a JSP, where user enters and it got a limit of only 15 characters. When user types in applemango>>> we validate the same in a bean method.

Somehow in bean it goes as appleapple & gt; & gt; and crosses the limit of 15 characters and throws an error. How do I solve this issue? Requesting your inputs. How do I Unescape those HTML entities in bean method to HTML characters ? or is there anyway to make it not get escaped to HTML entities when reaching the bean method?

Please suggest.

Thanks in Advance