How to display contents from a file into textarea - PHP

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How to display contents from a file into the textarea of HTML?

This is very easy and slightly tricky. Here is the PHP code: 

    print '<textarea>';
    include($_some_file_name);
    print '</textarea>';


Basically you are including the whole contents from the file into the PHP source which later rendered as HTML. Its just a tricky but effective solution.


Comments

Anonymous said…
Please, please don't do this. This will execute any PHP code in the file (which, if the file name can be arbitrarily specified, is a giant security hole). It will also not escape any HTML in the file, so tags will be rendered. If the file is:

</textarea><script>alert("hi");</script><textarea>

... you won't get any text in the textarea and instead end up with an alert box.

The correct way to do this avoiding both execution issues is:

print '<textarea>';
print htmlspecialchars(file_get_contexts($_some_file_name));
print '</textarea>';
February 16, 2016 at 1:38 AM
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