HTML textarea newline character

I have a text area in `HTML` where the user can enter text, but when the form is submitted, and its passed to a `php` script which `echo`'s it, there aren't any newlines. Knowing that `HTML` does that, I tried doing a `preg_replace()` before echoing it... ``` echo preg_replace("/\n/", "<br />", $_GET["text"]); ``` but still everything is on one line. So my best guess is that `HTML` textareas use a different newline character... can anybody shed some light on the subject? EDIT Ok, so I've figured out the problem: The Javascript is stripping the newlines. view code here EDIT 2 Ok, so thanks to Jason for solving this problem. I needed to do: ``` escape(document.getElementById('text')); ``` Instead of just: ``` document.getElementById('text'); ``` and the newlines are preserved, problem solved!