this will break if they put spaces on the blank lines and also probably won't work right if they're on a platform that sends \n\r instead of just \n.

i usually use something like:

$comment = "<p>" . (join '</p><p>', 
            grep {!/^\s+$/} 
            split /[\n\r]+/, 
            $comment) . "</p>";
[download]

which could be adapted to use <br> instead of <p> tags if you prefer.

anders pearson