perl form handling - carriage returns

[kintantee]

I have a simple textbox in an html form. I enter in some data on different lines in the textbox by hitting enter to go to the next line. When I display the string (either on the following webpage or writing to an external file), there are no carriage returns, only spaces. How do I create these carriage returns on the webpage or in the external text file? Thanks for checking this out...
- Jesse

[samsm]

I'm guessing that the line breaks are being preserved but they need to be converted from \n or \r to <br> in order for them to show up in a browser.

Is that it? If so, I'm sure there is a package that can take care of it, or you can use some regex, something like this perhaps:
/(\n\r)|\n|\r/<br>/
or maybe this:
/[^.]/<br>/

Post back if this helps or not... I haven't been working with Perl much lately so it has been fading from my memory which is a shame since it is so handy.