vs.
is a non breaking space, which represents an empty space where no line break occurs.
If I use
How about a workaround?
In my case I took the value of the textarea in a jQuery variable, and changed all  ""
to and clear class to have certain height and margin, as the following example:
jQuery
tinyMCE.triggerSave();
var val = $('textarea').val();
val = val.replace(/ /g, '
');
the val is then saved to the database with the new val.
CSS
p.clear{height: 2px; margin-bottom: 3px;}
You can adjust the height & margin as you wish. And since 'p' is a display: block element. it should give you the expected output.
Hope that helps!