The Ultimate PHP Guide: How to Correctly Handle and Store Markdown Line Breaks from a Textarea

When working on a PHP project, it's a common issue to find that Markdown line breaks (like `\n`) from a textarea are saved to the database as literal strings instead of actual newlines. This article dives into the root cause of this problem and provides a clean, secure solution using `str_replace`. We also emphasize the importance of using PDO prepared statements to prevent SQL injection, ensuring your data is stored correctly and remains readable.