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
PHP Side: from Textarea string to PHP string
$newList = ereg_replace( "\n",'|', $_POST['theTextareaContents']);
PHP Side: PHP string back to TextArea string:
$list = str_replace('|', ' ', $r['db_field_name']);