Say you want to allways save plain text data in a database. And
you let the user modify the data via an html form:

You use htmlspecialchars to print the data:
<input type="text" name="test" value="&quot;quote&quot;">

When you update de database with the data the user 
sent via form, you want to save it in plain text.

So, it'll be usefull to reverthtmlspecialchars($test).


Thanks.