Preserve line breaks in HTML,JAVA,Spring

i have a web application built with HTML(front-end),java(server-side) and i have a textarea when posting some data with line breaks (pressing enter after a word) the line breaks are not reserved (the data appears next to each other with no line breaks) how to preserve the line breaks ?, note that i am not using the tag when displaying (have to)

i am using the code server side to convert new lines into br

public String saveLineBreaks(String text) {
        return text.replaceAll("\n", "<br/>");
    }

but it doesn't work properly