How can PHP developers ensure that the content of a file is properly displayed in a textarea for editing?

When displaying the content of a file in a textarea for editing, PHP developers can ensure proper display by reading the file contents and escaping any special characters that could interfere with the HTML markup. This can be achieved by using the htmlspecialchars() function to convert special characters to HTML entities. 

<?php
$filename = 'example.txt';
$content = file_get_contents($filename);
$escaped_content = htmlspecialchars($content);
?>

<textarea><?php echo $escaped_content; ?></textarea>

Keywords

file handling file_get_contents htmlspecialchars textarea display

Related Questions