You are probably getting form submissions from a windows based machine as its line-ending is \r\n. If you want simply to "HTMLify" your text you could change the output record separator (see. $\).

use strict;
{
    local $/ = "\r\n";
    open(FOO, "somefile.txt") or die("open died - $!");
    chomp( my @data = <FOO> );

    local $\ = "<br>";
    print for @data;
}
[download]

Although you may want to put a \n after the <br> for a nicer source output.
HTH

broquaint