Question

I am trying to retrieve data from the db in an input field through PHP. Instead of the placeholder, I want to display this retrieved value in the input field if the data exists. I am able to retrieve the data from the db, but it is adding few extra tabs before the actual input.

<input type="text" name="title" id="title"  value="
<?php  
    $title='title';
    $clean = trim(retrieve_project_info($email,$title));
    echo $clean;
?>">

So, if the input in the db is ‘coldplay’. the retrieved data looks like ‘[tab][tab][tab]coldplay’ and the url has many %09s in it.

I have removed whitespaces by using the trim method. But, trim does not remove tabs.
Any idea how to remove these tabs?

Answer 1

Yes, removing tabs is easy, but you better find out why they are there instead of removing them.
But your code:

<input type="text" name="title" id="title"  value="
<?php  
    $title='title';
    $clean = trim(retrieve_project_info($email,$title));
    echo $clean;
?>">

would be better written like this:

<?php  
    $title='title';
    $clean = trim(retrieve_project_info($email,$title));    
?>
<input type="text" name="title" id="title"  value="<?php echo $clean; ?>">

Does that help removing your tabs?
The reason I suggest this is because retrieve_project_info could output the tabs.

One more observation: If $clean contains ” will your code fail?

EDIT: @palmi

This is how I do it:

function doFormSafeHTMLEncode($someStr){
    return htmlspecialchars($someStr,ENT_QUOTES,'UTF-8'); 
}

And I call that function everywhere where I output raw code to a formfield.