Empty paragraphs are being removed

Describe the bug
Empty paragraphs are being removed, Which is sometimes crucial for the formatting of the text.

To Reproduce

Load the following content

<p class="bn-inline-content">asdfasdf</p><p class="bn-inline-content">asd</p><p class="bn-inline-content">f</p><p class="bn-inline-content">asdf</p><p class="bn-inline-content"></p><p class="bn-inline-content"></p><p class="bn-inline-content"></p><p class="bn-inline-content"></p><p class="bn-inline-content"></p><p class="bn-inline-content"></p><p class="bn-inline-content"></p><p class="bn-inline-content"></p>

Will result in not preserving the empty lines

Is there a hidden option or something?
Thanks!

Did you try by adding like a blank space? I know it is not the optimal solution but it might be a workaround

that doesn't sound a look a good idea. The formatting will be inconsistent when loading new docs, or if the user just inserts a new line 2 times.

Found a workaround using turndown lib :

const turndownService = new TurndownService({
  blankReplacement: () => {
    return '&nbsp;';
  },
});
const html = await editor.blocksToFullHTML(editor.document);
const markdown = turndownService.turndown(html);

@meteorSD

@meteorSD do you have a more complete example. I'm not sure I understand how to use the lib for this use case.

Ideally i want BlockNote to take markdown as input, and mardown as output (in the onChange handler).

Would be great if you could help out here 🙏

problem still persists

My approach was to:

Add <br> tag to prevent empty <p></p> getting stripped
Normalize the empty block's content

export async function htmlToBlockNote(editor: BlockNoteEditor, html: string): Promise<Block[]> {
  if (!html) return []

  try {
    // Step 1 - Pre-process: add <br> to empty paragraphs so they're not stripped
    const processedHtml = preserveEmptyParagraphs(html)
    const blocks = await editor.tryParseHTMLToBlocks(processedHtml)

    // Step 2 - Post-process: normalize whitespace paragraphs back to empty
    return normalizeEmptyParagraphs(blocks)
  } catch (error) {
    return []
  }
}

function preserveEmptyParagraphs(html: string): string {
  // Replace empty <p></p> (with or without attributes) with <p...><br></p>
  // Also handles self-closing <p /> tags
  return html
    .replace(/<p([^>]*)><\/p>/gi, '<p$1><br></p>')
    .replace(/<p([^>]*)\/>/gi, '<p$1><br></p>')
}

const isEmptyOrWhitespaceParagraph = (block: Block): boolean => {
  if (block.type !== 'paragraph') return false

  // Type guard: paragraph blocks have inline content array
  const content = block.content as Array<{ type: string; text?: string }> | undefined
  if (!content || content.length === 0) return true

  // Check if all content items are whitespace-only text
  return content.every(
    (item) => item.type === 'text' && typeof item.text === 'string' && /^\s*$/.test(item.text)
  )
}

function normalizeEmptyParagraphs(blocks: Block[]): Block[] {
  return blocks.map((block) => {
    if (isEmptyOrWhitespaceParagraph(block)) {
      return { ...block, content: [] } as Block
    }
    return block
  })
}

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Empty paragraphs are being removed #986

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Empty paragraphs are being removed #986

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aespinoza96 commented on Aug 6, 2024

nchanged commented on Aug 14, 2024

meteorSD commented on Oct 26, 2024

elitan commented on Jan 9, 2025

dh4bu commented on Jun 12, 2025

davehuang-tw commented on Jan 22, 2026

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