What could be causing the issue of losing line breaks and spaces when retrieving data from a MySQL database in PHP?
When retrieving data from a MySQL database in PHP, the issue of losing line breaks and spaces could be caused by the data being stored with HTML entities encoded. To solve this problem, you can use the PHP function `html_entity_decode()` to convert the HTML entities back to their original characters.
// Retrieve data from MySQL database
$data = $row['content'];
// Decode HTML entities to preserve line breaks and spaces
$data = html_entity_decode($data);
// Output the data with preserved formatting
echo $data;