extra linebreaks and formatting stripped - please help

Thanks for the quick reply, I've managed to fix the <p>?</p>issue - that was a problem with the server side code like you mentioned (the charsets were both utf-8).

The real problem now is that it doesn't output any styles, or any tag attibutes - eg <a href="www.test.com"> becomes <a> and <span style=""> becomes <span>. This seems to be a direct output from fckeditor, as this happens before any interaction with the DB. Any ideas why this is happening?

Can anyone help please - im completely stuck. This is driving me nuts and no doubt its probably a simple fix- has anyone encountered this before?
Thanks in advance,
Dave

Thanks A.M, I downloaded Charles and found that the request variables are fine, so therefore the attributes must be being stripped somewhere between there and being written to the database (if I exit the script and echo the results before the DB, the attributes are gone). So therefore it must be a problem with my code, as the fck output seems good. But the strange thing is, I can't see anything in my script that could possibly be doing this. What should I look for?

Also noticed that while usually only tag attributes are removed, <h3> tags are removed entirely.

Thanks,
Dave