textarea, passing to php, and line breaks

[Fark_Maniac]

so I'm passing text via a form to php. I'm doing this via forms. what is frustrating me is that when I check to see how the text got passed from the textarea box...there are no line breaks. I'm wanting to try to build a list of items, then store them in a single record in mysql.

so in simpler terms...I enter this in my textarea box:
line1
line 2
line3

when I echo out my passed variable, I get this:
line1 line 2 line3

any way to preserve the line breaks?

 

[Fark_Maniac]

hrm...guess all I needed was to do just a wee bit more googling:

http://forums.htmlcenter.com/showthread.php?t=2165

basically, the \n in the textarea values are still there..but when outputting, it doesn't register. using the nl2br() function replaces the \n with a <br/>, which html would then correctly render.