form variables issue

Hi folks, I'm sure it is a very simple question for you but I'm getting almost crazy. I've got a simple form with several form objects, one of them is a text field. After submitting the form if one of the form objects hasn't been modified I will show the same form but keeping the data previously introduced. My problem is the text field, I can't show any special characters again, even if there was any space only the first word is shown, etc. I've been playing with different function like urldecode, urlencode, stripslashes, htmlspecialchars, etc. but couldn't show the same text. Do you know how I can fix this? Thanks a lot, David. Note that magic_quotes_gpc is enabled.