BuddyPress.org

Hi there,
When editing from frontend the custom “textarea” (multi-line) field, the line breaks are well understood with WP v3.8 + BP v1.9.
What I need to do is to automatically (batch) create the entry the database, and I do not find (despite an intensive search on the web) what is the code, ascii character or trick to define a line break in the DB value. I have tried ‘/n’ and ‘<br>’ without success.
(note : I feed this entry with importing data from an Excel spreadsheet).
Please help !
Thanks