How to format text with admin page

[eluser]tirithen[/eluser]
I'm making an adminpage for a website and I have two questions on text formatting, I have a page that uses a form to insert text into a database table, when I extract the text and view it with a echo command I won't get any line-break as it displays the text as html code. How do I do to strip the text from html tags and insert a <p></p> per each line-break the easiest way, I have a feeling that some of this handling is included in Code Igniter...

The other thing I wonder about is how to make the CSS dynamic since it's commonly stored as a file and not in a database and I want to be able to change the font and colors from within my adminpage. Which mehods are possible, could the CSS information be included in the generated html file in the heather or something like that or is there a way of creating and modifying an CSS file directly without a database, seem more complicated though.