image not appearing - disallowed character

[eluser]PhilTem[/eluser]
If you get your code from the database it is just code i.e. no PHP tags will be evaluated. That's why you will have the <?php ... in the parsed html.

You either want to eval() the code (though it can be a pain in the somewhere to set it up and it is a security issue) or you use some sort of bbcode/markdown parser over the content from the DB.