python regular expression to split paragraphs

Question

How would one write a regular expression to use in python to split paragraphs?

A paragraph is defined by 2 linebreaks (\\n). But one can have any amount of spaces/ta

Answer 1

Not a regexp but really elegant:

from itertools import groupby

def paragraph(lines) :
    for group_separator, line_iteration in groupby(lines.splitlines(True), key = str.isspace) :
        if not group_separator :
            yield ''.join(line_iteration)

for p in paragraph('p1\n\t\np2\t\n\tstill p2\t   \n     \n\tp'): 
    print repr(p)

'p1\n'
'p2\t\n\tstill p2\t   \n'
'\tp3'

It's up to you to strip the output as you need it of course.

Inspired from the famous "Python Cookbook" ;-)