Format string with line breaks into paragraphs

Question

I'm using Contentful CMS to manage content and pulling in the content with their API.

The content get pulled in as a json object. One of the keys in the object is for the main block of text for the entry I am pulling. The string has no actual code in it, but it does have line breaks. In Chrome console these appear as a small return arrow. Part of the object looks like this:

var article = {
  name: "Some name here",
  content: "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed lobortis libero lacus. Morbi non elit purus. Mauris eu dictum urna. Nam vulputate venenatis diam nec feugiat. Praesent dapibus viverra ullamcorper. Donec euismod purus vitae risus dignissim, id pulvinar enim tristique. Donec sed justo justo. Sed et ornare lacus.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed lobortis libero lacus. Morbi non elit purus. Mauris eu dictum urna. Nam vulputate venenatis diam nec feugiat. Praesent dapibus viverra ullamcorper. Donec euismod purus vitae risus dignissim, id pulvinar enim tristique. Donec sed justo justo. Sed et ornare lacus.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed lobortis libero lacus. Morbi non elit purus. Mauris eu dictum urna. Nam vulputate venenatis diam nec feugiat. Praesent dapibus viverra ullamcorper. Donec euismod purus vitae risus dignissim, id pulvinar enim tristique. Donec sed justo justo. Sed et ornare lacus."
}

Notice the line breaks within the content field. How do I take article.content and format these paragraphs into actual <p> tags? I want to render HTML like so:

<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed lobortis libero lacus. Morbi non elit purus. Mauris eu dictum urna. Nam vulputate venenatis diam nec feugiat. Praesent dapibus viverra ullamcorper. Donec euismod purus vitae risus dignissim, id pulvinar enim tristique. Donec sed justo justo. Sed et ornare lacus.</p>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed lobortis libero lacus. Morbi non elit purus. Mauris eu dictum urna. Nam vulputate venenatis diam nec feugiat. Praesent dapibus viverra ullamcorper. Donec euismod purus vitae risus dignissim, id pulvinar enim tristique. Donec sed justo justo. Sed et ornare lacus.</p>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed lobortis libero lacus. Morbi non elit purus. Mauris eu dictum urna. Nam vulputate venenatis diam nec feugiat. Praesent dapibus viverra ullamcorper. Donec euismod purus vitae risus dignissim, id pulvinar enim tristique. Donec sed justo justo. Sed et ornare lacus.</p>

Answer 1

The easiest way is to split on \n and then to rejoin on </p><p>:

1. split: Split takes a string and breaks it apart by another string, so for example if we have the string 1,2,3,4 and split on ,, we will end up with a javascript array like [1, 2, 3, 4].
2. rejoin: Join takes a javascript array, and glues it back together into a string using another string as the glue. For example, if we take that array we have [1, 2, 3, 4] and join on #, we will end up with a string like 1#2#3#4.

So following these steps but swapping out , for \n and # for </p><p> we are able to make a string like 1</p><p>2</p><p>3</p><p>4. This is almost right, notice that we don't have the starting <p> or the ending </p> so we just throw those on the beginning and end of the string:

var paragraphs = '<p>' + article.content.split("\n").join('</p><p>') + '</p>';

Check out this jsbin example. The top box is the input, the bottom is the output.