Prevent escaping of widget fields

So,

I just spent WAY too much time trying to find out an answer to my problem. I even found a posting with SAME problem that no one answered and they closed. I wanted to write the solution I found, but realized it was closed. 🙁

So, I am reviving it! Same title and everything in case someone tries to search for it (Like I did).

Here was original post (same problem):

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/253276
nutsmuggler
Member
Posted 1 year ago #
Hello folks,
a plugin of mine has a widget with a text field. The text field value is automatically escaped before being saved into the options. Since this widget specifies an HTML string, escaping should be prevented.
Any suggestions?
Davide

Here is the solution:
<?php echo html_entity_decode($welcome_text) ?>
http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.html-entity-decode.php

If a user is using your custom widget and they enter HTML into a TEXTAREA, if you use html_entity_decode() it will echo the HTML to the webpage. If not… then the HTML is escaped like <span> will be <span>.

Hope that helps the next guy/girl.