Question

Hi I am facing problem in handling special charecters inside
text area.

<textarea name="comments" value="$!comments" rows="4" cols="35">
$!comments
</textarea>

In a page where the text are takes input had given
as

o!@#$%^&*()_+=//\""':;<>,./?}{[]"?

when I navigate to same page for edit the
Text area should show the added text but it is showing some appended
tag information as

<>,./?}{[]"?." rows="4" cols="35" >o!@#$%^&*()_+=//\""':;<>,./?}{[]"?.

There is no reason for adding these special charecters except found in testing and so
should be fixed.
Please help

Answer 1

The browser sees this:

value=">,./?}{[]"?

and closes your textarea tag at value, then inserts the rest of the string.

If you want angle brackets < > you have to define HTML entities for them with < and >. Otherwise, the browser will thing “end of tag” and output the error you see above.