cftextarea HELP!!

Hi,

I am using CF8's cftextarea & rich text editor to accept some data from users. To save it in my MySQL database I use HTMLEditFormat() to escape the special characters.  This works fine - the text is saved as a string with all special chars escaped.

The question is - when I read that data from the database to display it on a web page it just displays it as a string - not html formatted text.

An example would be:

1. A users type in the words "Sample Text" with font colour red.
2. Its stored in my database as:
   

   <p><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">Sample Text</span></p>

3. When I output to my web page in cfoutput tags its displays it as a string (including the tags) - not as "Sample Text" in red type

Is there a simple way to unescape the chars or do I need to use Replace()......or is there a better way to do this?

Thanks.

Aaron