In the first function (trimBody) there is a line that reads.

etc.

Shouln't the equality operator "==" be used instead of the asignment operator "=" or am I worng in thinking this is s conditional statement?

There is no such thing as a stupid question, unless you ask it more than once :)

Actually, it's correct using the assignment operator. In this case, we aren't comparing statements. What happens is, each time the loop+conditional is run, $tmp is assigned the return value of the strpos function, and the if () statement evaluates that return value as well.

It's a cleaner method than evaluating/assigning a value to $tmp first, then evaluating $tmp.