Can you show us a small, self-contained bit of code that acts as you describe? With only a single line of code (and that, not formatted as code), it's impossible to guess what you're doing wrong.

And, please, read Markup in the Monastery. The subset of html used here doesn't recognize "</br>" as markup. As the page where you entered this says, "Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!"