replace \n with actual new line character code

I'm pulling content from a DB that has been sanitized using mysql_real_escape_string. Accordingly the new line characters now appear as "\n". The issue is that this content is displayed to users inside a < pre > tag so I cannot replace \n with < br/> for instance.

I suppose I could replace \n with the actual utf8 character code before inserting the result inside the < pre>.

Can somoneone assist here? Not using mysql_real_escape_string isn't really an option due to security policy.

Thanks.