HTML / PHP - Textarea shows tabs / spaces from code

Question

For readability reasons , I have a code that looks like this :

        <textarea cols="50" rows="5"  id="k99_brsa_settings[brsa_keep_settings_exp]"  name="k99_brsa_settings[brsa_keep_settings_exp]" />
            <?php echo $export; ?>
        </textarea>

I do not know how to represent / display tabs here , but it is actually like so :

[TAB][TAB][TAB][TAB]<textarea cols="50" rows="5" id="k99_brsa_settings[brsa_keep_settings_exp]"  name="k99_brsa_settings[brsa_keep_settings_exp]" />
[TAB][TAB][TAB][TAB][TAB]<?php echo $export; ?>
[TAB][TAB][TAB][TAB]</textarea>

or better yet with an image ( code editor ) :

The problem is , that those tabs appear in the Output like so :

and since those are DB entries, when I save , it actually CHANGES the entry (adds tabs and spaces )

I know that when I change the code to a one liner:

<textarea cols="50" rows="5"  id="k99_brsa_settings[brsa_keep_settings_exp]" name="k99_brsa_settings[brsa_keep_settings_exp]" /><?php echo $export; ?></textarea>

(image from code editor below )

...there is no problem and no tabs / spaces .

Is there any way to keep the tabs for readability AND eliminating those output tabs and spaces ? Does the <textarea> TAGS always HAVE to end after the output without spaces

Answer 1

You can still keep it on multiple lines with

<textarea ...><?php

?></textarea>

Alternatively you could do:

<?php
    echo "<textarea line1>"
        . $export
        . "</textarea>";
?>

Answer 2

You could try and trim extra whitespaces down to a single whitespace I guess. Or change your markup to remove the tabs.

<?php
    // This will replace any double whitespace with a single whitespace
    $result = str_replace('  ', ' ', $result);
?>

Answer 3

One alternative is to shorten your php a little by replacing <?php echo $export; ?> with <?= $export ?>. It may make you feel better about putting it all on one line.

I know people don't suggest the use of shorttags, but per http://php.net/manual/en/language.basic-syntax.phpmode.php, the short tag syntax will always be recognized by php 5.4 and up.