I am trying to find out how I can control how an excerpt is displayed using PHP. How do I get it to render the html spacing within the post instead of just showing one big paragraph.Hope that makes sense. 

Let me give you an example.

So my client has syndicated post and at the top of each post he wants to include a hyperlink to the actual author . Then there needs to be a line break then the actual excerpt of the content under it. Currently the excerpt just shows everything as one paragraph. 

I have managed to enter some php code to render the hyperlink in the excerpt but stuck on how to not let the excerpt strip the spacing.