store whitespace but not interpret it in <br> PHP

Hello all,

my problem is the following: I have a page where the user enters some data, let's say :

string1 = 'AGREHREHRHREHRE';
string2 = 'WEFEWGEWGEGEWGEGEGWG';

These data I use in another page, so I use the "<pre>" tag to display what the user has entered. The problem arrives when the user writes something like EWGEGEW EFGEGEW EGRGREGRE RGVFVDSVDS

This string, when I pass it into a variable, it is stored with newlines. I don't want to make any substitution of the newlines, as I want to preserve the spaces in the next page, and display the user's sequence as entered and not with 3 <br>'s, because there were 3 spaces in the original string...
any ideas?

before you print your string, try to remove all <br> and <br /> with str_replace