Echo html from a database - php

Question

I am attempting to write html data from a mysql database to a document using php. My code is below:
$content = html_entity_decode($dataToLoad['Text']);
echo $content;
$dataToLoad['Text'] contains this text data from the database:
<div>stuffInDiv</div>
What I would like to happen is for this text to be written as an actual div element in the document, but instead it is being written as a string. How can I force php to write it as an element?
Update for clarity:
To clarify, my issue isn't with decoding the html entities in the database, it's with writing the decoded html to the document. When I do:
echo $content;
where $content contains
<div>stuffInDiv</div>
I get the string "<div>stuffInDiv</div>" when really what I want to have is a div containing the string "stuffInDiv"

Answer 1

The Answer
It's possible your data has been encoded twice. Try echo $content; and then go to View Source in your browser. If it starts with <div>, then you'd need to run html_entity_decode twice. There is rarely a good reason, however, to store the HTML in the database with the entities encoded. It'd make more sense to store it raw and encode it when need be (e.g. if the code were placed into a textarea).
$content = html_entity_decode(html_entity_decode($dataToLoad['Text']));
echo $content;
The Reasoning
The reason is because the raw data in your database looks like this:
<div>stuffInDiv</div>
Your browser would print this on the screen:
<div>stuffInDiv</div>
The first time you run html_entity_decode, it does exactly that, i.e. it replaces & with the & character (& is the code for the ampersand).
This produces:
<div>stuffInDiv</div>
The web page spits out the encoded entities, i.e.:
<div>stuffInDiv</div>
Running html_entity_decode a second time would replace < with < (less than sign), > with > (greater than sign), etc.
This produces:
<div>stuffInDiv</div>
Which would be outputted to your page as:
stuffInDiv
Your Database Setup
As a note to your database:
When storing information in the database, do not encode the HTML at all. Unless HTML is being outputted onto a web page, it is no different from any other string and you shouldn't treat it differently. So if you were adding data to a table in your database that contains code, just do something like this:
INSERT INTO `my_content` (`name`, `content`) VALUES ("My Page", "<div>stuffInDiv</div>");
If you were obtaining this data from a textarea, use:
$connection->query('INSERT INTO `my_content` (`name`, `content`) VALUES ("'.$connection->real_escape_string($_POST['name']).'", "'.$connection->real_escape_string($_POST['content']).'");');
Without doing anything to manipulate the value of $_POST['content']. If you need to place that data back into the textarea (say, editing a page):
$result = $connection->query('SELECT `content` FROM `my_content` WHERE `name` = "'.$connection->real_escape_string($_GET['edit_page']).'");');
if ($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
print '<textarea name="content">'.htmlentities($row['content']).'</textarea>';
}

Answer 2

You can replace html entities with str_replace... (but surely there's an easier way)
$ar = get_html_translation_table();
$dataToLoad['Text'] = '<div>stuffInDiv</div>';
echo str_replace($ar, array_keys($ar), $dataToLoad['Text']);