Strip Paragraph Tag
<p>In my image.php I am using this code to grab the image caption of each image.  The problem is a paragraph tag ( <code>&lt;p&gt;</code> ) is being added around it and I don't want one to be.  Could somebody tell me how to strip this tag?</p>

<pre><code>&lt;?php if ( !empty($post-&gt;post_excerpt) ) the_excerpt(); ?&gt;
</code></pre>
