How can PHP developers ensure that HTML special characters are properly encoded when displaying data in a <textarea> element?

When displaying data in a <textarea> element, PHP developers can ensure that HTML special characters are properly encoded by using the htmlspecialchars() function to escape the characters before outputting the data. This function will convert special characters like <, >, ", ', and & into their HTML entity equivalents, preventing any potential security vulnerabilities or rendering issues. 

&lt;textarea&gt;&lt;?php echo htmlspecialchars($data); ?&gt;&lt;/textarea&gt;

Keywords

PHP HTML special characters encoding <textarea> data display

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