conversion challenge for badly formatted kindle book

[stumped]

i recently borrowed a book via Kindle unlimited and wanted to engineer a temporary epub version to read with working chapters. ( which I would delete once read)

when I got into the converted from mobi code, the whole book appeared as two enormous paragraphs ( one per XHTML file) using <br... for the line breaks throughout.
and also <tt ... spans for all the body text and an outer bracket of <code </code. not sure what the code tags did except make it harder to edit...

a nightmare to fix with regex as the <br dont have matching closing tags

so I forced the book through various format conversions instead, e.g. into and back from docx, AZW hoping that the breaks would get auto transformed into paragraphs - no joy
is there a way to do that that I missed ? i.e. to automate changing all <br line breaks into separate paragraphs, using calibre conversions tools ?

eventually I laboriously fixed it using mutiple manual regex passes, and then located & restyled the chapters

arguably not worth it as the story was not that great anyway, but just wondering about the <br thing in case I encounter it again

[ the book in question in case anyone want to view the sample code - is Gardener Summer by Nova - part of the american Apocalyse series - other books on that series are formatted sensibly ]
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gardener-Su...sap_bc?ie=UTF8

[kovidgoyal]

You can just replace <br> with <p> calibre will close up the paragraphs for you automatically, either during conversion or using the fix HTML tool in the editor.

[stumped]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

You can just replace <br> with <p> calibre will close up the paragraphs for you automatically, either during conversion or using the fix HTML tool in the editor.

good to know thanks. I maybe did it that hard way then by looking for the closing </span> which preceded the next </br and appending </p>

I wanted to preserved the location of the line breaks, but replace then with a text indented <p class instead.

I did not want the book to become a continuous single paragraph. That would have been even more unpleasant to read than the original .mobi which had the annoying tt font & no para indents