Why is textarea filled with mysterious white spaces?

forms, html, php, textarea

Solution

Look closely at your code. In it, there are already three line breaks, and a ton of white space before `</textarea>`. Remove those first so that there are no line breaks in between the tags any more. It might already do the trick.

Note that `if($siteLink_val)` condition is superfluous in this case and can be safely removed.

What is more important, all HTML output must be obligatory HTML-encoded. Hence your code could be like this

<textarea style="width:350px; height:80px;" cols="42" rows="5" name="sitelink"><?php 
    echo htmlspecialchars($siteLink_val);
?></textarea>

Problem

I have a simple text area in a form like this: ``` <textarea style="width:350px; height:80px;" cols="42" rows="5" name="sitelink"> <?php if($siteLink_val) echo $siteLink_val;?> </textarea> ``` I keep getting extra white space in this `textarea`. When I tab into it my cursor is like in the middle of the `textarea` and not in the beginning? What is the explanation?

Original source