How to save user-entered line breaks from a TextArea to a database?

How do I save user-entered line breaks from a <textarea> HTML element to a database?
It always removes the line breaks.

TextArea HTML element is preserving the white space in the database.
The problem appears when trying to display the \n on the web browser, which will fail.

To display \n in the web browser use :

<p style="white-space: pre-line">multi-line text</p>

When displaying the content you need to convert line breaks into <br /> tags, otherwise the web browser won't display them. This is probably why you think they aren't being saved. If you're using PHP, use the nl2br() function to do this. In other languages you could do a string replace, replacing all occurrences of "\n" with "<br />".

Just put the output text between <pre></pre> tags, that will preserve the line breaks.

I just learnt to use php's http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.nl2br.php">nl2br</a> function and it is working fine for me. I'm using it to style how my users receive an email when sent from another user.

Your problem will be solved using 'white-space' property: simply use:

<textarea name="description" id="description" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"></textarea>

And continue your work.

I know from experience that Browser text areas are less well-behaved than one would like, especially with regard to line breaks.

You could can to see if javascript would be able to interrogate the text area and find the line breaks before the text is sent to the server and so send the data in a more well-formatted way. But the amount of javascript debugging necessary to make this work across multiple browsers is probably not worth the effort.

Perhaps you should say that format you are trying to capture your data. There may be a better way to get the data than keeping track of line-breaks - though lines breaks can seem like any easy thing to capture in user input.

I noticed that breakable content saved normally if textarea is inside a html form. But if I use textarea without any form and try to edit a long text in it, insert line breaks and save content via ajax, it's saved as a merged text into database

Use PHP nl2br() Function while saving data from textarea to database like below

<textarea 
    name="PostContent" 
    class="form-control" 
    rows="12" cols="30"
    id="PostContent" 
    required=""
    style="white-space: pre-wrap; text-indent: 50px;"
    >
</textarea>

$PostContent=$_POST["PostContent"];
$output =nl2br($PostContent);

use $output variable to save to Database

you can add text in the text area and see the formatted text below.

function ex() {
  const text = document.getElementById("description").value;
  const ss = document.getElementById("add");
  ss.textContent = text;
}

<textarea name="description" id="description" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"></textarea>
</br>
<button onclick="ex();">check</button>
</br>
<p style="white-space: pre-line" id="add"></p>
<style>
p {
 color: red;
 text-align: center;
}