prevent parsing

I'm trying to output the contents of a "textarea" form field without parsing html (if it was entered).

I've played around a little with php's highlight_string() function, but to no avail.

ex.:

<textarea name="message"><b><font face="verdana">this is an html message pasted into the textarea box</font></b></textarea>

<?
echo $message;
?>

returns:
this is an html message pasted into the textarea box )

I would like to return the actual string that was entered:

<b><font face="verdana">this is an html message pasted into the textarea box</font></b>

Any help would be much appreciated!

You can hard code it by replacing each
< (less than sign)
with:
< (the character code for the less than sign)

Another way is to run the string through PHP's htmlspecialchars($message) function

Use htmlentities()

bladx

Thanks, works like a charm.