Keeping newlines when sending form

Hello, I'm trying to send a form textfield to my php script with something in it like this. bla bla and bla (notice the empty lines) bla bla bla bla If i echo the form data all the newlines are gone and it will look like this bla bla and bla (notice the empty lines) bla bla bla bla Is there a way to keep the returns or find them and then replace them with <br> when echoing or storing in my mysql dBase? I want to use it to store pages of text with all the returns intact. Carlo