line breaks nl2br

I have code that inserts text from a textarea into a db. When there are line breaks in the text it inserts 'rn' as a line break.

When I read the text out of the db an print it on a page it prints the entire text with not line breaks but only the rn in its place.

I have tried using:

nl2br(htmlspecialchars());
and
nl2br(htmlentities());

It still does the same thing. Am I missing something? Is there a function I am missing?