VS 2010 - Trim Empty HTML Whitespace

I have a web application where the user uses an HTML editor to input some formatted text to show on the website. This text is stored, as HTML, in a database. It turns out now, after some time, that users are sometimes entering whitespace (newlines, spaces, etc) before and/or after the text they are entering, and this whitespace shows up in the rendered text on the page. Multiple sets of this text are displayed top to bottom, and due to this whitespace the separation between bits of text varies, which doesn't look very pretty. So, I've been asked to get rid of the whitespace automatically.

Seemed like an easy task at first, I'd just call Trim on the string. But that won't work, the 'whitespace' when rendered isn't actually whitespace at all, it's a bunch of <br /> or <br> or <br></br> tags, or spaces such as, even empty paragraphs <p></p> sometimes. So calling Trim won't help, I need to get rid of all the tags that would render as whitespace.

The HTML editor control I'm using may or may not have built in support for this, but it doesn't matter, the database is already full with texts that contain these newline tags, so the best option I can see is to simply trim this whitespace before displaying it on the page. [Code]