php recursive function string excerpt

Question

I am trying to create an excerpt of a blog entry in html. I dont want the excerpt to include any images so I included a function which strips images out, which is working correctly.

I am using fckeditor which wraps images in

. So if the html was

<p><img src="/yada" /> Here is some sample text. </p>

the output from the function would be

Here is some sample text.

However...If the image is the only thing inside the p tags, the function returns an empty string, which is correct, but undesirable.

I have tried to make a recursive function that passes the content, starting from the end of the empty p tags, until it finds a p tags that has content, but it just keeps returning an empty string.

function get_excerpt($content) {        

    $start = strpos($content, '<p');


    if($start !== FALSE) {   

        $p_open = strpos($content, '>', $start) + 1;
        $p_close = strpos($content, '</p>', $p_open);
        $length = $p_close - $p_open;
        $p_contents = substr($content, $p_open, $length);

        $p_contents = removeImages($p_contents);
        $contentLength = strlen($content);

        $newContent = substr($content, $p_close); 

        if($p_contents == "")
        {
            get_excerpt($newContent);
        }
        else
        {
            return $p_contents;
        }

    }
    else 
    {
        return 'Excerpt not available';
    }
}


function removeImages($string)
{
    $newString = preg_replace("/<img[^>]+\>/i", "", $string);
    return $newString;
}