How Drupal's CCK already provides a safely formatted cck field for display
Came across an interesting post when investigating some "n/a" text appearing in a CCK node field when not logged in. I was using the code echo content_format('field_description', $field_description[0]);
to safely format and output the description field. Not sure exactly why it happens but it turns out that there's no need to actually do it that way as CCK already provides a safe string of that field for outputting to the browser that is already formatted accordingly.