Do not escape html stored as string (execute or process html string)

A. If you want to show the HTML Tags you can just use htmlentities

Example

$x = "<p>html</p>";
echo htmlentities($x);

Output

<p>html</p>

B. If you want the other way round its possible your string is stored as <p>html</p> that is why you are seeing <p>html</p> then you should use html_entity_decode

Example

$x = "<p>html</p>";
echo html_entity_decode($x);

Output

html

C. It could be you are not using a web broswer and you want html then you should use strip_tags

Example

$x = "<p>html</p>";
echo strip_tags($x);

Output

html

Use single quotes

Single quotes vs double quotes in PHP

echo '<p>HTML</p>';