this is the first paragraph.
It has three lines.
Of which this one is the third.

A blank line denotes a paragraph. This one
has got two lines only.



The third paragraph is preceded with several
 blank lines, and it has itself
  three,
   no, wait, four lines.

Last paragraph. All paragraphs  should be shown
    each as
one line running "perl -p00 -le 's/\n/ /gs;s/\s+/ /g;'"
on that file, with multiple blanks condensed into one.


##</code><code>##

perl -p00 -le 's/\n/ /gs;s/\s+/ /g;' text

##</code><code>##

perl -p00 -i.bak -le 's/\n/ /gs;s/\s+/ /g;' text