Whitepsace in external text

Hi,

I am loading some external text into my textarea (HTML)

The problem is I am formatting the txt file like this

<b>this is my header</b>

This is my body text

My text area in flash puts a big space beween them unless I do this

<b>this is my header</b><br />This is my body text

This is ok but makes my external text files really herd to read. It there a way to strip out the white space?