Variations on my problem have been discussed elsewhere, so I hope I'm not duplicating! I'm implementing a simple Private Messaging System as part of a web app. I've got an annoying problem though when dynamically inserting text into a textarea box in order to make a reply. Getting the content and displaying it is fine, but I can't work out how to format it correctly. Obviously, I can't use html tags, but plain text formatting like line breaks and carriage returns seem to be ignored too. This happens when an existing message is being displayed either as part of a reply or as a thread in a new message. How do I check what formatting is being saved in my db? Or indeed what formatting is being sent back from my db?!