How to display code as plain text

[Cremnlin]

I'm wondering how I should go about displaying some code in plain text without it actually performing what the code does. Specifically, I'm trying to display some youtube embeds as just text.

[dsonesuk]

just use < and > as in <span style="color:red;">THIS IS TEST</span> would now be <span style="color:red;">THIS IS TEST</span>, which is treated as text instead of html code.

[Cremnlin]

Thanks, another thing, though. I'm withdrawing this code from a database, so the only thing I can think of is writting some php code that replaces the mentioned characters with things like '&lt'. I guess I should have posted this in the php section, then, but is there a special function that does this in php?

[dsonesuk]

just use str_replace() as in$textcode = str_replace("<","<", $row['htmlcode']); //changes code from table field name htmlcode$textcode = str_replace(">",">", $textcode); // converts remaining code passed to $textcode

[jeffman]

See also htmlspecialchars or htmlentities

[dsonesuk]

or better still use htmlentities($str); does exactly the same in one instance;echo htmlentities($row['htmlcode']);