Formatting in user-defined template

[thalamus]

I've come across a problem when trying to output a formatted series of fields into a post, in that a 'newline' (or a <br /> doesn't appear to be recognized when the string is submitted.

Briefly; I've created a plugin that allows for a new thread post to have its own template - let's say its for a review. The new template is being called by the relevant hook (newthread_post_start), and the template has several fields in addition to the main comment box (i.e. name of book, author, date of publication, date reviewed, rating). These field values are being picked up correctly, and what I want to do is to collate them all, and place them into the $vbulletin->GPC['message'] store. In order to do that, I pick up the field values after the form is submitted and assign them to variables that are concatenated, but each with a newline for spacing. For example:

  $newline = chr(13) . chr(10);
  $new_message = '[b][size="4"]' . $rev_title . '[/size][/b]' . $newline;
  $new_message .= '[size="2"]' . $rev_author . '[/size]' . $newline;
  $new_message .= '[i][size="2"]' . $rev_date . '[/size][/i]' . $newline . $newline;
  $new_message .= '[b]' . $rev_initpara . '[/b]' . $newline . $newline;
  $new_message .= $rev_message . $newline . $newline;
  $new_message .= '[url="' . $rev_link . '"]Full Review Here[/url]' . $newline;
  // and set it as the main message text from the editor as an all-in-one for processing by vBulletin core
  $vbulletin->GPC['message'] = $new_message;

Obviously, $rev_message contains $vbulletin->GPC['message'] which is brought across from the hook, and is the main wysiwyg/editor text content.

As you can see, the above assigns $newline with the character values of a lf and cr, but this does not output. I've also tried to substitute "<br />" and "\r\n" into $newline, all to no avail (in fact the saved post simply displays the <br /> or \r\n as characters).

Does anyone know what the lf/cr values are that are interpreted properly by the core function in order for this to output correctly into a post?

Sorry if some of this doesn't make sense; it's quite a frustrating problem

TIA for your assistance