string replacement

[Anon]

I'm making a section where users can add comments, and they use a <textarea>, much like this one.
My problem is in making it look nice on the page. What happens is I lose the new lines. How do I insert a <br> tag each time they have hit the enter key?

Note: I tried the easy way out, using a <pre> tag, but that didn't do well. It made my tables long and disgusting, and I can't have that. They only solution is to insert the line break, I believe.

[Anon]

;p
Tom is great.
<3

[Anon]

the is a nice little php funtion made just for you. try nl2br() and look over the string functions on php.net there might be some other stuff there to help you.

[Anon]

Thank you immensely 🙂
I did look at some replacement functions, like preg_replace.
However, I couldn't make head or tail of it, and I'm pretty new. I think it's a bit over my head.