Problem printing some symbols accurately from a pgf plot table

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Why do the less than symbol (<) and the greater than symbol (>) appear wrong as upside down exclamation or question mark?

I'm trying to print symbols from my pgf plot table, which usually works fine. However, some signs, for example <and > aren't printed correctly. (In these particular cases, < is printed as an ¡ and > is printed as an ¿.

I figure it can't be an encoding issue, since I'm typing the symbols are contained within my .tex file, so I guess it might have something to do with < and > being symbols normally used for syntax. However, putting an escape character before the symbol doesn't solve the problem.

Minimal non-working example:

\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage{pgfplots}
\usepackage{pgfplotstable}
\usepackage{tikz}

\pgfplotstableread[col sep=comma, header=false]{
<
}\mydata

\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\pgfplotstablegetelem{0}{0}\of\mydata
\node[draw=black] at (0,0) {\pgfplotsretval};
\end{tikzpicture}

\end{document}