display mysql newline in HTML

Question

Certain fields in our mysql db appear to contain newline characters so that if I SELECT on them something like the following will be returned for a single SQL call:

Life to be sure is nothing much to lose

But young men think it is and we were young

If I want to preserve the line breaks when displaying this field on a webpage, is the standard solution to write a script to replace ' ' with a br HTML tag or is there a better way?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Assuming PHP here...

nl2br() adds in <br /> for every . Don't forget to escape the content first, to prevent XSS attacks. See below:

<?php echo nl2br(htmlspecialchars($content)); ?>