\ is a command thing, but as far as I know / is not, so not sure why it needed 2 of them to work. Check out the \ commands near the top of this page:
https://www.lua.org/pil/2.4.html - \n for example can be used to drop to a new line when writing to an external txt, lua or ini file, etc. While iterating through some strings, it will automatically drop to a new line each time \n is encountered (see my message below about using external files).
It works though, you can see the log results in this screenshot here:
https://gyazo.com/75586bb3b27944e463f1b120d97a78dbQuick note: don't add any white space " " between the last word, the br tag & the next word as it will include those in the table. I ended up with something like this...
... after the first string I tried. You could strip out the white space obviously but you would have to be very selective that it doesn't strip out the wrong bits.
Something you could consider doing is writing them into external files as you could replace the
tags with \n & each time you write to the file it will automatically drop a line each time it encounters \n.