Search results – Remove <h1>

Hey all

I’ve got a search results page on which I’m outputting the title of the post/page with an excerpt below.

At present I’m using this function to trim the_excerpt down to 250 characters and follow with a ‘…’ :

<?php $little_excerpt = trim(substr(strip_tags(get_the_excerpt()),0,250))."..."; ?>
<?php echo $little_excerpt; ?>

This works, even if there is no excerpt specified for the post (WP generates it automatically am I right?)

The problem I’m having is that all my post content entries start with <h1>Page title</h1> so when my excerpt is output I get something like this:

Expertise In Action Our flexible, professional training has produced great results for diverse organisations

Because my post content looks like this
<h1>Expertise In Action</h1><p>Our flexible, professional training has produced great results for diverse organisations</p>

As the h1 and page title are the same in most cases what I’m trying to do is strip out the <h1> and output everything past this i.e.

Our flexible, professional training has produced great results for diverse organisations

I’ve tried using PHP preg_replace such as this

<?php $little_excerpt = trim(substr(strip_tags(preg_replace("<h1>.*?<\/h1>","",get_the_excerpt())),0,200))."..."; ?>

But I get an Unknown modifier ‘.’ error.

Can anyone provide me with a function which can achieve what I’m after?

Thanks in advance
Matt