I would like to be able to accept \\n or \\r\\n and convert them to for use in the page. Although when a user submits a t
You can use nl2br to add the BR line break element to line break character sequences:
$html = nl2br($plain);
Note that the BR elements are just added:
nl2br("foo\nbar") === "foo\n<br />bar"
And to prevent strip_tags to remove P and BR tags, specify them in the second parameter:
$clean = strip_tags($html, '<p><br>');