Well both examples create an odd thing:

<br>
FOO<br>
BAR<p><br>
<br>
BAZ<p><br>
<br>
[download]

notice the extra break tags? where as a set of expressions will do the job like this:

$text = <<TEXT;
FOO
BAR

BAZ
TEXT
$text =~s/\n{2,2}/<p>/g;
$text =~s/\n{1,1}/<br>/g;
$text =~ s/</\n</g;
$text =~ s/>/>\n/g;
print $text;
[download]

gives us this result

FOO
<br>
BAR
<p>
BAZ
<br>
[download]

which i think is a little more of what you are looking for. I would suggest looking at the Regular Expressions book by O'Reilly. I left out some optimizations so you could go hunting for them.

take care

little_mistress@mainhall.com