Your idea to establish a heuristic for what makes a paragraph in badly formatted HTML is interesting. From the top of my head, I can think of several ways a paragraph could be denoted.

• text after an opening paragraph tag, of course, up to a possible closing tag
• text after an ending paragraph tag that's not marked as anything special itself
• two or more line break tags successively
• a div
• a list, either ordered or unordered
• a table row, or sometimes an individual cell

Of course, what makes this a special kind of torture for you is that it's not easy to tell if a table row should be kept together and that most of these elements can be contained within one another. You almost need a parse tree of the document plus a heuristic in order to preserve the author's intended paragraphs.

Your life gets easier if you can treat a table as an object as a whole.

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