How to match a paragraph using regex

Question

I have been struggling with python regex for a while trying to match paragraphs within a text, but I haven't been successful. I need to obtain the start and end positions of the paragraphs.

An example of a text:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod
tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At
vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. 

Stet clita kasd gubergren,
no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.

Ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod
tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At
vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren,
no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.

In this example case, I would want to separately match all the paragraphs starting with Lorem, Stet and Ipsum respectively (without the empty lines). Does anyone have any idea how to do this?

Answer 1

You can split on double-newline like this:

paragraphs = re.split(r"\n\n", DATA)

Edit: To capture the paragraphs as matches, so you can get their start and end points, do this:

for match in re.finditer(r'(?s)((?:[^\n][\n]?)+)', DATA):
   print match.start(), match.end()

# Prints:
# 0 214
# 215 298
# 299 589