What are some best practices for handling HTML content within textareas in PHP to prevent page layout issues?

When handling HTML content within textareas in PHP, it is important to properly escape the HTML content to prevent any layout issues or potential security vulnerabilities. One common approach is to use the htmlspecialchars function to encode special characters in the HTML content before displaying it within the textarea.

// Escape HTML content before displaying it in a textarea
$textarea_content = htmlspecialchars($html_content, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
echo '<textarea>' . $textarea_content . '</textarea>';