Open Post Data How To Keep Text Formatting?

im sure this will be pretty simple, at the moment i have some code which sends text from a textarea to a php file, the php file then stores the data into a database.the javascript post is as follows:

var text = document.getElementById(area).value;
http.open('post', 'autosave.php?text='+text);

there is a little bit more to this(just a handle response).My issue is that when the data is passed through javascript newlines and breaks disappear, so when i call the saved data it is presented as one long string with no formatting.i tried the nl2br() function and htmlspecialchars() function in the php file that the javascript passes the data to, this made no difference. I then tried to replace /n with <br /> in the javascript before passing the text variable again this made no differnce.