separating lines in a text area field

Hi, I've look at the PHP Faq, poked around the www.php.net site and searched the mailing list archive but could not come up with an answer. However, I'm sure this question has been asked before on more than one occasion. I have a form that calls a PHP function which sends the contents off as an e-mail. Within the form, I have a text area field. My e-mail looks like: field1 = value1 field2 = value2 etc... For the text area field, it does NOT wrap the lines but puts everything on one line. Is there a PHP routine that can split the lines in a textarea object? Does this depend on whether the machine is Windows or UNIX? If so, is there a system independent routine? Thanks, Don