Have Textarea box save line breaks

[huladier]

Is there any way to make a textarea box save <br /> automatically. I have a text area box on my page and then I save what the user types into a database with PHP and then output it later on. right now though it wont save any line breaks unless they use HTML.

Is there a way to make it rich text (I think that is what its called).

On a side note, how would I type <br /> in a paragraph and not have it be executed but instead be displayed as text.

Thanks.

[Elev8]

You could use <pre> $content </pre> to show the linebreaks... It's not the best way of doing it but probably the easiest.