tinymce placeholder containing HTML

I have a placeholder I’d like to add to my tinymce editor, which contains HTML so when it displays it, it closes the placeholder attritube because of the double quotes in the HTML.

The HTML looks like this:

<p style="font-family: Arial;">hello</p>

I tried using strip_tags in PHP, which does work, however it removes all of the line breaks from the <p> tags.

I tried using nl2br and replacing the <br /> tag with PHP_EOL and rn which didn’t work.

str_replace('<br />', 'rn', nl2br(strip_tags('<p style="font-family: Arial;">hello</p>')));

How can I add this placeholder in with or without the HTML, but keeping the line breaks.