Question

I’d like to transform what the user inputs into an textarea on a html page into a <p>-tagged output where each <p> is replacing new lines.

I’m trying with regular expressions but I can’t get it to work. Will someone correct my expression?

String = "Hey, this is paragraph 1 \n and this is paragraph 2 \n and this will be paragraph 3"
Regex = r'(.+?)$'

It just results in Hey, this is paragraph 1 \n and this is paragraph 2 \n<p>and this will be paragraph 3</p>

Answer 1

I wouldn’t use regular expressions for this, simply because you do not need it. Check this out:

text = "Hey, this is paragraph 1 \n and this is paragraph 2 \n and this will be paragraph 3"
html = ''
for line in text.split('\n'):
   html += '<p>' + line + '</p>'

print html

To make it one line, because shorter is better, and clearer:

html = ''.join('<p>'+L+'</p>' for L in text.split('\n'))