What are the potential issues when trying to display data in a textarea using PHP?

When displaying data in a textarea using PHP, special characters such as "<" and ">" can cause the HTML to render incorrectly. To solve this issue, you can use the htmlspecialchars() function to convert these characters into their HTML entities before displaying the data in the textarea. 

&lt;?php
$data = &quot;This is some &lt;b&gt;bold&lt;/b&gt; text.&quot;;
echo &#039;&lt;textarea&gt;&#039; . htmlspecialchars($data) . &#039;&lt;/textarea&gt;&#039;;
?&gt;

Keywords

PHP textarea data display escaping XSS

Related Questions