can anyone explain this code segment?

Apologies for posting to php.windows with a non-windows-specific question, but I haven't been receiving php.general for several weeks now; I assume it went mailing-list-only to lower the load on the news server?? I've been poking through source to a message-board script, and came across some code I don't quite understand; ... $text=ereg_replace("<[^>]*>", "", $text); $text=ereg_replace("^<[^>]*>", "", $text); $text=ereg_replace("<[^>]*>$", "", $text); echo $text; ... in context, they are trying to strip any html and/or scripty stuff out of the body of a message before outputting it. The first statement removes '<anything in brackets>', the second replaces anything in brackets starting at the beginning of a line... Q. Isn't that redundant? Shouldn't the first statement have removed all the bracket-pairs? In which case, this statement will never find a set of brackets and thus does nothing at all?! ... and the third removes anything in brackets followed by a dollars-sign... Q. Even more redundant!? There should be no bracketed stuff left by now! Can anyone figure out the logic behind this??