What are the best practices for handling line breaks in PHP when saving and displaying user input from a textarea in a database?

When saving user input from a textarea in a database, it is important to handle line breaks properly to ensure that the text is displayed correctly when retrieved. One common approach is to use the PHP function nl2br() to convert newline characters into HTML line breaks before saving the text to the database. When displaying the text, you can use the nl2br() function again to convert the line breaks back to HTML format.

// Save user input to the database
$user_input = nl2br($_POST['textarea_input']);
// Insert $user_input into the database

// Retrieve user input from the database
$user_input = // Retrieve user input from the database
echo nl2br($user_input);