Are there any best practices or guidelines for handling data transfer to textarea elements in PHP?

When transferring data to textarea elements in PHP, it is important to properly handle special characters such as newlines, quotes, and HTML tags to prevent security vulnerabilities like XSS attacks. One common approach is to use the htmlspecialchars function to escape these characters before outputting the data into the textarea element.

<?php
// Example data transfer to textarea element
$data = "This is some <script>alert('malicious code')</script> data\nwith newlines and quotes";

// Escape special characters before outputting to textarea
echo '<textarea>' . htmlspecialchars($data) . '</textarea>';
?>