line breaks in a textarea

Question

I know when saving a textarea you can use the nl2br() or str_replace to change the /n to br tags etc. However what im not sure about how to insert line breaks into a textare

Answer 1

You could use str_replace to replace the
tags into end of line characters.

str_replace('
', PHP_EOL, $textarea);

Alternatively, you could save the data in the database without calling nl2br first. That way the line breaks would remain. When you display as HTML, call nl2br. An additional benefit of this approach is that it would require less storage space in your database as a line break is 1 character as opposed to "
" which is 6.