Inserting multiple lines in a text field

Anon

I have a small database with a huge text field. I have 3 questions concerning the text field, all related to having multiple lines. I'm using php4 and PostgreSQL.

I am appending the table with a file that contains carriage returns, but the data is not stored with the carriage returns. Why not? I've tried having the field set up as text and varchar(8000).
I am also trying to insert a record into the same database/field using a web form (Post method). Again, the data is stored with no line breaks.
I am calling the form mentioned above while searching the database and again, no line breaks. This of course should be resolved when I figure out how to store multiple lines in one field but I thought I would ask anyway.

In all of my searches I've found similar questions where people dump the information out to html, which is cool, but I want the data to show up on the web form so the <BR> tag doesn't help. I thought the \n or \r would work when inserting into the database but it isn't. Any help would be greatly appreciated...Kirk.

Anon

you aren't looking at the data right, or you are stripping them out when you get the data before you put it in the database...

just do this:

form with textarea, get the data, store it in the database.

when you store the data, do a nl2br(htmlspecialchars(stripslashes($data)))

when you show it in the text area on the form, just do stripslashes($data)