Need to Bust Out Variable

In the act of importing data from a FileMaker Pro database, I have a column in a table that has several unique names seperated by a new line character. So, when I select and get the $category variable, it contains a string with the new line character seperating the names that make up the whole string. I need to bust out those names and list them in checkboxes. I've looked at parse_str($category), but I think that's looking for a comma delimiter. I've tried $newvariable = $explode("\n",$category), but $newvariable[0] has the whole string. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm about 90% done with converting my http://www.CameraCrews.com site from FileMakerPro driven to MySQL/PHP. Feel free to explore. You'll notice the category checkboxes don't work yet, and there's a few loose ends to tidy up. Don Smith