I am generating an HTML form, which contains some code in a text area.

Question

Editorial Team

Asked: May 23, 20262026-05-23T08:52:37+00:00 2026-05-23T08:52:37+00:00

The generated HTML looks like this:

<textarea id="message" name="message"
    rows="18" cols="40">The quick brown fox
    <?php echo $page_url;?>
</textarea>

When the page is rendered in a browser, it looks like this:

The quick brown fox
         http://www.example.com

I cant explain it, since the variable contains no leading spaces – and no CSS styling is being applied either.

can anyone think of what may be causing this?

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Editorial Team · Answer 1 · 2026-05-23T08:52:37+00:00

Editorial Team

Whitespaces inside <textarea> are rendered as-is, unlike HTML, which renders successive whitespace as one.

<textarea id="message" name="message"
    rows="18" cols="40">The quick brown fox<?php echo $page_url;?></textarea>

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