htmlspecialchars removes formatting

Question

i'm calling the htmlspecialchars function inside another function in a class, but when i do this, even though the data displays, it removes all formatting showing the data in a single line.

this is the code:

class Name {
    . .. .
    public function h($s) 
    {
    echo htmlspecialchars($s, ENT_QUOTES);
     }

    public function formatQuotes($row)
    {

    return "<p id=\"ab_quotes\">" . this->h($row['cQuotes']) . "</p>"
    . "<p id=\"ab_author\">" . this->h($row['vAuthor']) . "</p>";             
    }

}

if i remove the reference to htmlspecialchars function, it displays the data as it should.

UPDATE:

this is the css which i've applied:

p#ab_quotes{
    font-size: 22px;
    word-wrap: break-word;
    position: absolute;
    top: 80px;
    left: 5px;
    padding: 8px 6px;
    }

p#ab_author {
    font-size: 15px;
        position: absolute;
    top: 200px;
    right: 5px;
    padding: 8px 6px;
    text-transform: uppercase;
    letter-spacing: 0.1em;
    color: #EB3B55;
    }

there is no html within $row['cQuotes'] and Author variables. it is the css formatting which is removed when the htmlspecialchars is implemented.

another thing, that i noticed was that if i removed ENT_QUOTES, it works, but again with it, it removes the formatting. why is this so?

Answer 1

What do you mean by formatting? If you mean HTML code, htmlspecialchars will replace these characters crucial to HTML with their entities:

• '&' (ampersand) becomes '&'
• '"' (double quote) becomes '"' when ENT_NOQUOTES is not set.
• ''' (single quote) becomes ''' only when ENT_QUOTES is set.
• '<' (less than) becomes '<'
• '>' (greater than) becomes '>'

(taken from here: http://php.net/manual/en/function.htmlspecialchars.php)

Of course none of the formatting will have effect then. That's the point of htmlspecialchars().

Answer 2

The problem might be that the function h() needs to return the data rather than echo it (based on how you are using the result of h())