Disable formatting on textarea

Question

I'm using the following code in my plugin to display a <textarea> field on a page:

echo '<textarea required="required" name="Message" class="textarea" cols="70" rows="10">'.esc_textarea($message).'</textarea>';

However, WordPress seems to be inserting <p> and <br /> tags into the textarea contents if the message contains newline characters. I'm assuming this is being caused by the default wpautop() filter.

Is there a way to disable filtering of <textarea> contents on a page?

Edit

Some more information about how my plugin works. It creates a hook for the_content, which will append data to the contents of certain pages. I still want wpautop formatting to be applied to the appended content, just not for the <textarea> field.

Here is a rough outline of how my plugin is setup:

function get_special_content()
{
    $text = '';

    // Customized content is appended to text here
    // including the textarea field

    return $text;
}

function my_plugin_content_hook($content)
{
    if(is_some_special_page()) {
        return $content.get_special_content();
    }

    return $content;
}

add_action('the_content', 'my_plugin_content_hook');

Answer 1

Add a priority to push your function to the end of the hook queue.

add_action('the_content', 'my_plugin_content_hook', 1000);

Then, in your get_special_content function you will need to apply wpautop manually to the content to which you want it applied.

function get_special_content()
{
    $text = '';
    $autopeed = 'content to autop';
    $text .= apply_filters('wpautop',$autopeed);
    $text .= "your textarea code";
    return $text;
}

I believe that will solve your problem.

Answer 2

I discovered that wpautop will preserve the contents of <pre> tags. By placing a <pre> tag around the <textarea> tag, I am able to prevent the text area contents from being modified.

echo '<pre><textarea>'.esc_textarea($message).'</textarea></pre>';

I'm not sure why wpautop doesn't also ignore <textarea> tags by default. I can't imagine a scenario where you would want wpautop to be applied to the contents of a text area. Maybe it's just an oversight.