When exporting data from a textarea question it converts newlines to html br which display in plain text in excel - br is not converted to a newline in excel text fields.

Also - in some cases this conversion also corrupts the data further and replaces a new line with the following:

_X000D_<br />

Unfortunately I can't reproduce this reliably and it seems to be related to the way a user actually generates the original content.

I wonder if this function was previously used to output data to the screen and not just output data to excel which is why it converted the newlines to br but it would be good if someone else could confirm this.