...the text I am concerned with is in an array (@ThisFileArray)...
A for loop is usually better for looping over an array.
...with paragraphs separated by an extra newline....
Perl can do that for you if you set $/ (see How can I read in a file by paragraphs?). 
#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

{
  local $/ = q{};
  
  my @txt = <DATA>;
  
  for (@txt) {
    chomp;
    print qq{*$_*\n};
  }
}

__DATA__
Text blah blah, make my point here. More text and even more continuing
+ on along the way.

New paragraph starts here, there were 2 newlines just before I started
+ this paragraph, so I should somehow be able
to match on that, but I can't figure out how to search for that throug
+h my array.

[download]
*Text blah blah, make my point here. More text and even more continuin
+g on along the way.*
*New paragraph starts here, there were 2 newlines just before I starte
+d this paragraph, so I should somehow be able
to match on that, but I can't figure out how to search for that throug
+h my array.*

[download]
Note that the extra pair of braces and local restricts the scope of the change to $/ (which is a global).

I've added stars instead of tags. I would seriously consider using something like HTML::Element's new method to deal with creating HTML tags. YMMV.

In reply to Re: question on multi line pattern matching for html formatting by wfsp
in thread question on multi line pattern matching for html formatting by tallCoolOne

Title:
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and:  <code> code here </code>
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