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

I found an alternative solution for reading and working with in-browser, simply read the element's text() using jQuery, it returns the characters as display characters and allows me to write from a textarea to a div's innerHTML using the property via html()...