Saving \n as <br> to database

I tried this but it's not chaning new lines to <br>

<textarea name="addesc" id="addesc"><?php echo $data['addesc']; ?></textarea>

Code (markup):

$data['addesc'] = preg_replace("/\r\n|\r/", "<br />", $_POST["addesc"]); $data['addesc'] = trim($data['addesc'])

Code (markup):

As such there's no $_POST["addesc"] on the post.php page. There's $_POST["do"]. I tried it too. No results.

I am sure I am missing something. How is something like that done exactly?

 

Use the following existing function:

http://php.net/manual/en/function.nl2br.php

 

This did it:

$data['addesc'] = htmlentities(nl2br($data['addesc']));

Code (markup):