How to stop an html TEXTAREA from decoding html entities

Question

I have a strange problem:

In the database, I have a literal ampersand lt semicolon:

<div  

whenever its printed into a html

Answer 1

In PHP, this can be done using htmlentities(). Example below.

". htmlentities($content) ."";
?>

Without htmlentities(), the textarea would interpret and display the TM symbol (™) instead of "™".

http://php.net/manual/en/function.htmlentities.php