There is an incredible but little known built-in function with PHP that replaces all new line characters within a string with html <br /> tags. Its perfect if you ever want to display the contents of a text area within HTML.

$str = nl2br($str);

This will replace all new line characters with valid XHTML <br /> tags.There is also an optional parameter to turn of XHTML and just use traditional <br> tags.

$str = nl2br($str, false)