nl2br和htmlentities在textarea上

Question

So i have this textarea where i want people to be able to write stuff about themself and be able to use quotes around specific words and at the same time be able to make new section of text without have to write the <br> . I tried doing this but i failed. What am i doing wrong?

<textarea id="about"></textarea>

$about = nl2br($_POST["about"]);

$text = htmlentities($about, ENT_QUOTES);

$query = "INSERT INTO text VALUES('', '$text'";
$query_run = $db->query($query);

I inserted this into my database, but when i try to echo it out, the break doesn't apear.

$id = $_POST["id"];
$sql = "SELECT * FROM text WHERE id = '$id'";
$sql_run = $db->query($sql);
while($row = mysqli_fetch_assoc()){
   $about = $row["about"];
   echo $about;
}

example of what it looks like when i insert it.

cola<br /><br />cola<br /><br />"cola"<br /><br />love that stuff!

Answer 1

$_POST["about"] will be with \\n so you don't need to use nl2br() with it.

Use it when you're displaying the value on a page. (eg echo nl2br($about) )