I\'m having lots of trouble preserving the exact look of how a user types out a short paragraph.
My problem is that random slashes and html show up
That's basically it.
On the second step you need to escape it with mysql function.
But for correct outputing it you need to do following
<pre><?= htmlentities($mysqlRow['data']); ?></pre>
This will get from database result needed information and will outputs it like it is. With all spaces and tabs and html tags in it. (If user enters <html>
this will output <html>
like text)