Disable wpautop, keep line breaks

How can I disable automatic paragraph tags, but retain line breaks?

I have used this to remove wpautop:

remove_filter( 'the_content', 'wpautop' );
remove_filter( 'the_excerpt', 'wpautop' );

But there are no more line breaks in the text.

Here’s the full solution.

First disable wpautop in your functions.php

remove_filter( 'the_content', 'wpautop' );
remove_filter( 'the_excerpt', 'wpautop' );

Then parse your content/excerpt with nl2br (a standard PHP function).

add_filter( 'the_content', 'nl2br' );
add_filter( 'the_excerpt', 'nl2br' );