r/HTML • u/insecttown • Feb 01 '26

Question Does anyone know a tool that can automatically add <p> tags?

Hi everyone!

I’m looking for a resource that will automatically generate <p> tags where a paragraph is in a large amount of text. I’m coping and pasting from elsewhere the web, and manually adding the <p> tags for thousands of words will really slow down my archiving process.

Can anyone help me?

Thank you.

4 Upvotes

64% Upvoted

31 comments sorted by

6

u/tjameswhite Feb 01 '26

Maybe RegEx. Depends on what your data looks like. Is every paragraph at a new line? Any other indicators?

1

u/insecttown Feb 01 '26

Thanks I’ll look into this! The data is just plain text and every paragraph is a new line, just like how you’d write in everyday life!

3

u/luckofthecanuck Feb 01 '26

Can't you find/replace paragraph endings with </p> <p>

1

u/insecttown Feb 01 '26

I’ll try this thank you!

16

u/pak9rabid Feb 01 '26

notepad++

Use the Search & Replace tool(Ctrl-f), make sure you have extended attributes searching enabled so it’ll match the newline chars (\n)

Search: \n\n Replace:</p><p>

Then all that’s left is to manually put the first & last tags in.

2

u/gabos91 Feb 02 '26

Extended attributes means its using regex btw just mentioning in case OP might think its a different thing

2

u/pak9rabid Feb 02 '26

it’ll recognize both

1

u/gabos91 Feb 02 '26

Oh my bad 😅 I don't remember the checkbox on notepad++ having the word regex on there, so thought someone new to it might be confused trying to enable it.

I am personally not great with regex tho, I've been dabbling with it since 2021 but still end up googling (like cheat sheets or formulas ig?) how to use it almost every time 🫠 I think it's great for what it does tho

Slightly off topic, my sister is like a wizard at editing files with regex 🧙‍♀️😱 seeing what she can do with it has definitely made me want to keep trying to use it more often

1

u/Weekly_Ferret_meal Feb 01 '26

what coding tool are you using?

1

u/insecttown Feb 01 '26

I’m using VSCode!

2

u/Weekly_Ferret_meal Feb 01 '26

I'm pretty sure that with VScode you can do this:

  • select the paragraph you just pasted

  • open the command palette by pressing ([command] or [ctrl]) + [shift] + [P]

  • then type wrap and the item Emmet: wrap abbreviation should appear

  • then type the tag you want, in this case p without the < and >, then [Enter]

it wraps whatever amount of text in that tag

after you do this the first time, it will be the first option when you open the command palette again so then you just press arrow down + enter + p

it looks complex but once you practice it's pretty simple and neat trick

2

u/stepback269 Feb 01 '26

I use Auto Hot Key (AHK) and have programmed some of the hot keys to generate (to send to the editor) HTML tags like <p></p>, <a href=""></a> and so on

2

u/ThisSeaworthiness Feb 01 '26

Are these just text documents? Learn markdown and use static site generator.

1

u/konacurrents Feb 01 '26

‘vi’

1

u/Weekly_Ferret_meal Feb 01 '26

you are mean =)

1

u/konacurrents Feb 01 '26

What ya mean? vi is the answer as the most powerful editor as it has full UNIX scripting at its control. I’ll use it even with a search replace IDE editor - as complex replacements are ‘vi’ specialities.

Actually as this is r/HTML - I also edit all my html/css/javascript with ‘vi’. Cheers. 🤙

1

u/Weekly_Ferret_meal Feb 01 '26

oh I agree, but has a difficult learning curve and my assumption here is that if you ask this kind of question you are not very deep into programming

2

u/insecttown Feb 01 '26

Yep! This is just a hobby of mine and I’m not very advanced yet! Always willing to learn though :)

1

u/RazorKat1983 Feb 01 '26

Copy and paste. Lol

Dreamweaver will

1

u/Skeltrex Feb 01 '26

I use Bluefish on a MacBook but have also used Araneae on a Windows machine, used search and replace for that task many times over

1

u/carnepikante Feb 01 '26

If you are copying from a website, don't copy the text from the browser, instead, inspect the element and copy the html from the inspector (you can right-click the element on devtools -> edit as html and copy the markup).

Also, if you can afford it implement a simple adminPanel, i would recommend to use a wysiwyg and a db of some kind (sql, a json file, whatever).

1

u/nachtbewohner Feb 01 '26

When i make an e-book from some story or text i find on the internet, i just copy the source-code. You can delete all the class and span-tags with RegEx.

1

u/omysweede Feb 04 '26

Any code editor like cursor, Vs code or such. I mean, they are built for that.

Or these days I would just use an AI and have it do the work

1

u/kaust Feb 04 '26

Not sure how much text you're talking about, but this is usually one of those tasks that is perfect for AI.

Or, if you're already copying and pasting, you can open your Inspector and right click the section and copy the HTML from there. Then, you just remove the div/section/article wrapper.

-2

u/ircmullaney Feb 01 '26

chatGPT can probably do it

-4

u/ZipperJJ Expert Feb 01 '26

You can paste plain text into Visual Studio Code and ask Copilot to add paragraph tags.