HTML forms: display a text in an input (textarea)

Question

I have a form that I pre-fill with my database data. It is working perfectly for all my input. I have a text (that I enter in my database using a textarea). But when I am using the following the text does show in the text area (if I change it to input it is working but I do not have several lines and column allowed with textarea)

<textarea 
    rows="4"
    class="form-control" 
    name="roster_description" 
    id="roster_description" 
    placeholder =
        <?php if ($description_roster){
                echo '"'.$description_roster.'"'; 
            } else {
                echo "";
            }?>>
</textarea>

any ideas?

Answer 1

Just tested it and it works:

<textarea 
    rows="4"
    class="form-control" 
    name="roster_description" 
    id="roster_description" 
    placeholder = "<?php if ($description_roster) echo $description_roster;?>">
</textarea>

Answer 2

Ok no clue why but the following is working:

<textarea class="form-control" id="description_roster" 
          name="description_roster" rows="4"
          placeholder=<?php
                         if ($description_roster){
                             echo '"'.$description_roster.'"';
                         } else {
                             echo "";
                         }
                       ?>
></textarea>

Thanks to those who had a look

Answer 3

The issue was that your statement:

echo "";

doesn't produce quotation marks - it produces the empty string. What you want is to replace this with:

echo '""';

which will produce placeholder=""> instead of placeholder=> .