XPath Expression To Deal With BR Element

I have a bunch of HTML documents with a P element and ‘id’ attribute set to ‘title’. Like so:

[code=html]<p id=”title”>
Title of the document
[/code]

In some cases, I have a title that has a forced line break:

[code=html]<p id=”title”>
This Is A Title Of A Document<br>With A BR Element In It
[/code]

I have created an UpdateAndSynchronize.php document that scans a tree where all my web documents are, loads the document (using DOMDocument::loadHTML()), sets up the XPath object, and extracts the info I want to put in the MySQL database.

My XPath expression to get the document title is:

[code=php]$docTitle = $htmlXPath->query(‘.//p[@id=”title”]’)->item(0)->textContent;
$docTitle = trim(str_replace(array(“n”, “rn”, “r”, “t”), ” “, $docTitle));
[/code]

$htmlXPath is an XPath object.

I had to add the second line to get rid of leading and trailing whitespace.
My problem is the str_replace() is not working, because the <br> element in the XPath query is probably being converted (translated?) to some other character.

The question is:

[U][B]How should I be setting up my XPath->query() to convert <br> elements into a single space character?
[/B][/U]

Also, is there a good reference (book? web pages?) that show how to set up XPath queries (evaluations?) with lots of examples?

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