A. If you want to show the HTML Tags you can just use htmlentities
Example
$x = "html
";
echo htmlentities($x);
Output
html
B. If you want the other way round its possible your string is stored as <p>html</p>
that is why you are seeing html
then you should use html_entity_decode
Example
$x = "<p>html</p>";
echo html_entity_decode($x);
Output
html
C. It could be you are not using a web broswer and you want html
then you should use strip_tags
Example
$x = "html
";
echo strip_tags($x);
Output
html