I have a similar issue - I have a textarea that gets saved to the db. When I display it, I lose the line breaks. if I wrap with nl2br the break tag is displayed as text rather than rendered as a line break so my output looks like this:

this is some text<br />this is the next line

checking the source and the break tag is served as:

@lt;br />

in my blade file I tried the following:

{{ $words }}  //No line breaks displayed
{{ nl2br($words )) }} // result as described above
{{ nl2br(e($words)) }} // result as described above

Any clues as to why this may be happenning?

It should be

{!! nl2br(e($words)) !!}

if you do so, be carreful with $words containing JS or so

@hairmenu with e() that should be fixed info: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33075158/what-is-the-e-method-in-laravel-views-for