hey guys I have a mysql database but in this database you can insert test such as a guestbook or comment board but if the user has pressed enter or put in some blank lines when I echo it to my webpage it puts everything as if there were no newlines or returns how do I have this show the returns and newlines as they were put in?

language is php

Well, they're probably showing up ( if you right click and "view source" ) they just aren't showing up the way you want them to. PHP runs on the server, and renders to html, which generally ignores white-space. ( Two spaces are the same as one, and a bunch of line-feeds are ignored. )

So the answer is actually pretty simple. You just need to turn the "enter" character into an html line break tag. I don't know PHP very well ( I'm an ASP.NET guy ), so I can't give you the exact code, but you want to run a string replace function over what you pull out of the database, look for character 13, and replace it with the string "<br />" You could shorten that to "<br>" but the first one is more "proper;" either will work.

dead on man perfect answer and here is the solution for anyone else with php

$content= str_replace(chr(13),"<br />",$content);

TP for you

or....

nl2br($content);