PHP get first paragraph from a string function

paragraphFunction.php

<?php 
    function getFirstPara($string){
        $string = substr($string,0, strpos($string, "</p>")+4);
        return $string;
    }
    
    // If you wanted to remove the paragraph tags from the HTML
    function getFirstPara2($string){
        $string = substr($string,0, strpos($string, "</p>")+4);
        $string = str_replace("<p>", "", str_replace("<p/>", "", $string));
        return $string;
    }
    // Then call the function, passing the string variable    
    echo getFirstPara($HTMLString);
?>

This will return unexpected results in some cases. For instance in a document that has an image or a table before the first paragraph.

This would give you the first full paragraph, skipping over any images or tables:

$string = substr($string, strpos($string, "<p"), strpos($string, "</p>")+4);

$html = '<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.</p>';
preg_match('/<p>(.*?)<\/p>/s', $html, $match);
and then
echo $match[0];