stripping break tag ( if found )

[alli]

How would I go about checking a block of text to see if it has the '<br>' tag at either the beginning or the end? And if it does find it, how would I just strip those two occurances?

Anybody?

[tbach2]

off the top of my head...

$pattern = array("/^<br>/",
                 "/<br>$/");
$replace = array("//",
                 "//");
$preg_replace($pattern,$replace,$your_string);

this of course will not work for xml style <br /> tags, but I think you can see how to do it.