force_br_newlines

If you set this option to true, TinyMCE will force BR elements on newlines instead of inserting paragraphs. This option is set to false by default since paragraphs is a much better concept. BR elements should only be used when you really have to (mostly never). Also as of 3.x the forced_root_block option is enabled by default so if you really want to disable paragraphs disable that one as well.

Example of usage of the force_br_newlines option:

tinyMCE.init({
	...
	force_br_newlines : true,
	force_p_newlines : false,
        forced_root_block : '' // Needed for 3.x
});

Example of paragraph no margin css

This CSS will reduce the space between (lines) paragraphs to zero. It will look more like the default line spacing in popular Word processors.

p {margin: 0; padding: 0;}

Post processing away P tags before output to Flash/E-mail

See also: Reasons why not to use BR elements for linebreaks

Perl Example

Note that this code does not rely upon regular expressions for processing the HTML, since you really cannot rely upon them to do the job. For a detailed discussion, see How do I remove HTML from a string? in perlfaq9; at the terminal of a machine with Perl, type perldoc -q html.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use HTML::TokeParser;
use CGI ();

my $cgi = CGI->new;

# Test by uncommenting next line and changing the value:
# $cgi->param(content => "your html here for testing only");

# Replace 'content' with name of your TinyMCE-edited field:
my $p = HTML::TokeParser->new( $cgi->param('content') );
my $output = "";
while (my $token = $p->get_token){
	if ($token->[0] eq 'S'){
		if ($token->[1] eq 'p'){
			$output .= '<br/>';
		} else {
			$output .= $token->[4];
		}
	}
	elsif ($token->[0] eq 'E'){
		if ($token->[1] eq 'p'){
			$output .= '<br/>';
		} else {
			$output .= $token->[2];
		}
	}
	elsif ($token->[0] eq 'PI'){
		$output .= $token->[2];
	}
	else {
		$output .= $token->[1];;
	}
}

# Your new doc is in $output
warn $output;
__END__

PHP Example

// Get content from TinyMCE
$content = $_REQUEST['content'];
$content = preg_replace('/<p[^>]*>/', '', $content); // Remove the start <p> or <p attr="">
$content = preg_replace('/</p>/', '<br />', $content); // Replace the end
echo $content; // Output content without P tags