Preserve Line Breaks From TextArea When Writing To MySQL

Two solutions for this:

1. PHP function nl2br():

   e.g.,

   echo nl2br("This\r\nis\n\ra\nstring\r");
   
   // will output
   This<br />
   is<br />
   a<br />
   string<br />
   

2. Wrap the input in <pre></pre> tags.

   See: W3C Wiki - HTML/Elements/pre

Here is what I use

$textToStore = nl2br(htmlentities($inputText, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'));

$inputText is the text provided by either the form or textarea. $textToStore is the returned text from nl2br and htmlentities, to be stored in your database. ENT_QUOTES will convert both double and single quotes, so you'll have no trouble with those.

Got my own answer: Using this function from the data from the textarea solves the problem:

function mynl2br($text) { 
   return strtr($text, array("\r\n" => '<br />', "\r" => '<br />', "\n" => '<br />')); 
} 

More here: http://php.net/nl2br