HTML in Form TextArea

[phpnstuff]

I'm trying to display HTML in a textarea, everything displays fine except the space symbol " " it outputs to a blank space...how can I tell the text area not to treat that as HTML within the textarea?

I already use &lt; = < & &gt; = > symbols so w3c validates my page.

[the tree]

&amp;nbsp;

[ChiefNX]

<pre>&nbsp;</pre>

[felgall]

<pre>&nbsp;</pre>

That wont work because you can't use HTML inside a textarea as textareas only accept plain text and entity codes. The only way that works is &amp;nbsp;