title: Getting HTML before first <br/> tag
body: <p>I've been trying to extract the content of a variable before the first break tag occurs in php.</p>
  
  <p>e.g  </p>
  
  <pre><code>$content = "this is my content &lt;br /&gt; as it continues &lt;br /&gt; another break tag";
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I want to get the part before the first <br /> tag and store it in a variable $first.  Thus for the above example, $first should contain "this is my content"</p>
  
  <p>Any idea how to do this in php?  I'm stuck with the split() php function...</p>