Google-sheets – How to generate a basic HTML (

and
) version of another cell in Google Sheets

I'm using Google Sheets to help prepare posts for various social media sites. For some of the sites, I need to cut-and-paste HTML because my posts contain YouTube videos, and the only way to avoid using the site's UI is to post HTML directly.

So, in my sheet, I have a column main text with content such as this:

Paragraph 1

(empty line)

Paragraph 2

(empty line)

Paragraph 3

Now I want to make another column (basic html) that references main text:

<p>Paragraph 1</p>
<br>
<p>Paragraph 2</p>
<br>
<p>Paragraph 3</p>

Here is how my data is formatted:

• There is always at least one paragraph. There may be as many as five paragraphs.
• There is always an empty line between paragraphs.

So this is what I want to do:

• If a line contains text, add a <p> tag in front and a </p> tag in back.
• If there is an empty line, convert it into a <br> tag.

I have read through the list of Google Sheets functions and I have some basic familiarity with the Script Editor, but I don't know what direction to take to try to implement this.