Storing HTML in MySQL

Question

I'm storing HTML and text data in my database table in its raw form - however I am having a slight problem in getting it to output correctly. Here is some sample data stored in the table AS IS:

<p>Professional Freelance PHP & MySQL developer based in Manchester.
<br />Providing an unbeatable service at a competitive price.</p>

To output this data I do:

echo $row['details'];

And this outputs the data correctly, however when I do a W3C validator check it says:

character "&" is the first character of a delimiter but occurred as data

So I tried using htmlemtities and htmlspecialchars but this just causes the HMTL tags to output on the page.

What is the correct way of doing this?

Answer 1

Use & instead of &.