Php $_POST method to get textarea value

Question

I am using php to get textarea value using post method but getting a weird result with that let me show you my code

<form method="post" action="index.php">
    <textarea id="contact_list" name="contact_list"></textarea>
    <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Send" id="submit"/>
</form>

I am entering some names and their email address in the textarea, and everytime i echo the value or textarea it skips the email address and only showing the name let me show the way i am entering value in textarea

"name1" <[email protected]>, "name2" <[email protected]> 

and once I will echo using php it will only echo the name and will skip the email address.

Answer 1

Always (always, always, I'm not kidding) use htmlspecialchars():

echo htmlspecialchars($_POST['contact_list']);

Answer 2

Make sure your escaping the HTML characters

E.g.

// Always check an input variable is set before you use it
if (isset($_POST['contact_list'])) {
    // Escape any html characters
    echo htmlentities($_POST['contact_list']);
}

This would occur because of the angle brackets and the browser thinking they are tags.

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