There's a useful function in PHP called nl2br, which breaks up a paragraph with regular line breaks and replaces them with <br /> HTML breaks. It works great, but sometimes you need to break the paragrpah into actual paragraphs, separated by <p> and </p>. The function below does exactly that - finds line breaks (\n) and encapsulates the text in <p></p> tags:

function nl2p($string, $line_breaks = true, $xml = true) {
$string = str_replace(array('<p>', '</p>', '<br>', '<br />'), '', $string);
// It is conceivable that people might still want single line-breaks
// without breaking into a new paragraph.
if ($line_breaks == true)
    return '<p>'.preg_replace(array("/([\n]{2,})/i", "/([^>])\n([^<])/i"), array("</p>\n<p>", '$1<br'.($xml == true ? ' /' : '').'>$2'), trim($string)).'</p>';
else 
    return '<p>'.preg_replace(
    array("/([\n]{2,})/i", "/([\r\n]{3,})/i","/([^>])\n([^<])/i"),
    array("</p>\n<p>", "</p>\n<p>", '$1<br'.($xml == true ? ' /' : '').'>$2'),
    trim($string)).'</p>'; 
}

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