line breaks in a textarea
Don't do nl2br when you save it to the database. Do nl2br when you're displaying the text in HTML. I can strongly recommend to not store any HTML formatting in the database (unless you're using a rich HTML editor as well, in which case it would be silly not to).
A newline \n will just become a newline in the textarea.
You could use str_replace to replace the <br /> tags into end of line characters.
str_replace('<br />', PHP_EOL, $textarea);Alternatively, you could save the data in the database without calling nl2br first. That way the line breaks would remain. When you display as HTML, call nl2br. An additional benefit of this approach is that it would require less storage space in your database as a line break is 1 character as opposed to "<br />" which is 6.
Ahh, it is really simple
just add
white-space:pre-wrap;to your displaying element css
I mean if you are showing result using <p> then your css should be
p{ white-space:pre-wrap;}