need to get rid og new line extra spaces

Hello,
I have a wysiwig textarea editor, something like this one, I want to
update my text, the content is retrieved from database and inserted
into this textarea through a javascript function, the first arguemnt
passed, which is the data from database, contents additional new
lines, so this causes a javascript error,

I have tried these:

$des = mysql_result($select2 , 0 , 'des');

$des = stripslashes($des);
$des = html_entity_decode($des);
$des = str_replace("\n", " ", $des) ;
$des = preg_replace("/\r?\n/", "", $des);

I still see new lines after divs, uls, ols, li(s) lists
Help appreciated
itpvision@yahoo.com