Keeping Textarea Format?

I have a textarea field in a form, and am then using ASP to write the form details to a mySQL database.

What I would like to do is retain the basic line break/paragraph format the user has used in the textarea field, so that is written to the database in such a way that it will be displayed with the same line breaks etc. when it is written back out to the displaying page.

I have tried inserting <pre>; but long paragraphs are blowing the page apart, as each line is being forced to stay as one line.

I have tried wrap="physical" and this keeps the line break format - and writes it in the html code on different lines but the browser displays it as one block of text again, losing formating. wrap="virtual" gives me the same result.

This thread posting form seems to do what I want mine to do ... it adds a <br /> to the end of my paragraphs, or maybe the displaying page does, how does this get done, with either html or ASP?