Ben Reiniger wrote on Wed, Dec 2, 2015 01:15 PM EST:
Evidently the problem with special characters is an issue with textarea
elements in general. From what I can tell, the best solution is to escape
all such characters when pulling the information from the database to
populate the textareas; then the textarea (for whatever reason) will
collapse all of that escaping back into what actually lives inside the
database.