XHTML in HTML 4

[KeredDrahcir]

I've got an HTML 4 page and I'm using textareas to gather the content to display on the page. I'm giving people the option to preserve the line breaks and using nl2br on the output to keep line breaks in.
The problem is that the line breaks are coming out as <br/> and that is XHTML. The W3C Validator says to use <br> and so 82 out of 84 warnings are due to this. Is there some way to get it to generate the empty br tags rather than self-closed ones?

[Dormilich]

use the second parameter that indicates XHTML: nl2br($str, false);

[KeredDrahcir]

Does that mean I put the second parameter as true it will include <br> tags as opposed to <br/> tags or is it the other way round?

[Dormilich]

see nl2br() for the correct usage.

[KeredDrahcir]

Thanks. That's great.