How to echo an input of an textarea with line breaks?

Question

I'm using an textarea to send text to my DB.

Screenshot of db:

When I'm reading from the DB it removes the line breaks, how can I keep them in $row['opmerkingen']?

Answer 1

When displaying text, use nl2br() to convert newlines to <br/> tags, i.e., instead of <?php echo $row['text']; ?>, use <?php echo nl2br($row['text']); ?>.

By default, browsers display newlines as spaces, therefore they have to be converted to <br/> tags.

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For those who find this useful - please consider using white-space: pre-line, suggested by Emil Vikström. I'm not a web guy anymore and easily can't verify this, but Boaz says in comments that it is supported by all modern browsers. If so, that should be preferred to using nl2br().