Textarea filled with

I fill a textarea with information from a custom field in a post and the result is that every new line has a
. This is okay for me, but I need to strip the
when I display the content in the textarea.

I’ve tired doing this: <?php echo strip_tags($string); ?> but absolutely nothing happens. I’ve tried doing this manually on a string I create myself and that works, but not when loaded from the database.

What’s wrong? Can I do something else?