Ok, the whole thing is pretty complicated and badly coded on my behalf - but basically: There's an array created from a file which works like this: XX | XX | XX XX | XX | XX X = data [b]The problem:[/b] the third field is for a long message which has line breaks in it i tried nl2br(); but then it adds actual line breaks (aswell as <br>) into the file and the system reads it on each line and messes it up. [b]What i need:[/b] For it to replace line breaks within the input field to <br> but keep it all on one line within the .txt file. Hope you understand and thanks, James. [[b]+[/b]] Edit Used str_replace(); to change line breaks to html which worked, seems so obvious now. Anyway, thanks.