use the function nl2br() in the output.
example
echo nl2br($row['body');
What this function does is change all new line chars (\n) to an html <br>
Textarea problem
Moderators: egami, macek, gesf
put the output within a table with a fixed width
<table width="100"><tr><td>blah blah blah....</td></tr></table>
<table width="100"><tr><td>blah blah blah....</td></tr></table>
if it were a normal sentence with spaces between the characters it would contrain it within the 100