What are some best practices for formatting output in PHP to include line breaks for data retrieved from a database?

When retrieving data from a database in PHP, it's common to need to format the output to include line breaks for better readability. One way to achieve this is by using the PHP nl2br() function, which converts newline characters into HTML line breaks. This function can be applied to the database data before displaying it on the webpage to ensure that line breaks are preserved.

// Retrieve data from the database
$data = "This is some data retrieved from the database\nwith line breaks";

// Apply nl2br() function to format the output with line breaks
$formatted_data = nl2br($data);

// Display the formatted data with line breaks
echo $formatted_data;