I have built my first web app from scratch as I am still learning the best practices.
I have an issue with my TEXTAREA block, I would like to save spaces and break so that formatting looks nice.
Eg. This is my text area description
new line starts here
However I got it to work but not on every occasion I see my users posting text that is displayed like this
&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;<br /><br /><br /><br />
When I am saving the content into DB I am using this
nl2br(htmlentities($string, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'));
when I look up results in DB they show me breaks like
and when I am displaying back to the screen I do this
ucfirst (strtolower (substr(str_replace(array("<br />", "<br/>", "<br />"), '', escape($results[$i + $offest]->description)), 0, 80)));
However some work fine and some still display result that I showed you above,
What would be the best way for me to escape but preserve breaks and formatting for storing into DB and on display put it all back together correctly?
Thank you for your time
