Carriage returns in textarea?

[timstring]

I'm trying to echo a textarea where the text is in paragraphs with a carriage return at the end of each. I can enter the text and using /phpmyadmin, I can see that the returns are present in the field of the mySQL file. However, when echoing the textarea, the carriage returns are missing. What special character do I have to put into the textarea so that the returns are shown correctly?

[bradgrafelman]

The carriage returns aren't missing - PHP doesn't get hungry and start eating line breaks.

Instead, you're probably facing a different issue; you want line breaks in the data to result in line breaks in the text shown in your browser. Note that line breaks inside text in HTML markup is ignored by the browser; instead, you'll want to turn those line breaks into a <br> HTML entity. To that end, take a look at the function [man]nl2br/man.

[timstring]

that works. tanks