List_cat spacing problem

I want to display a simple list of the hierarchy of a category on one of my pages and used as code:

< ?php list_cats(FALSE, ”, ‘name’,’asc’, ”, TRUE, FALSE,TRUE, FALSE, FALSE,TRUE, FALSE, ”, FALSE,”, ”, ‘1,2,4’,TRUE); ?>

This works of course but the output is displayed in a strange way (even with the default and classic themes)

Output roughly looks like:

* Parent (2)

— Child 1 (2)

——child of child 1 (2)
— Child 2 (0)
—— child of child 2 (0)

I cannot explain the appeareance of the blank lines and after looking into the html that was generated I noticed that it looked like:

I cannot explain the appearance of an “end paragraph” which was not opened. This code does not validate on W3C.

Any help would be appreciated.

P.S. I tried to include the HTML but that did not works as it was executed instead of displayed as text