I may need to work on the titling of this.

I have a function:

    function excerpt($limit) {
            $excerpt = explode(' ', get_the_excerpt(), $limit);
            if (count($excerpt)>=$limit) {
                array_pop($excerpt);
                $excerpt = implode(" ",$excerpt).'...';
              } else {
                $excerpt = implode(" ",$excerpt);
              } 
            $excerpt = preg_replace('`\[[^\]]*\]`','',$excerpt);
            return $excerpt;
        }

And I'm calling it with <?php echo excerpt(25);?>. This is what my HTML looks like:

    <div class="recent-meta-excerpt">
       <?php echo excerpt(25);?>
       <a class="read-more" href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">Read More <i class="fa fa-long-arrow-right"></i></a>
    </div>

It's outputting like this:

   

     <div class="recent-meta-excerpt">
           <p>It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout....
           <a class="read-more" href="http://www.stepyouraimup.com/blog/no-featured-image/">Read More <i class="fa fa-long-arrow-right"></i></a>
           </p>
        </div>

But I don't want the `<a>` inside. When I'm calling the excerpt the `<a>` isn't even inside so I'm not sure how it's being wrapped in a `<p>`.

**EDIT**

I realized I didn't include a crucial function. After removing it, the `<p>` disappeared.

	// Grab First Paragraph Of Text And Ignore Images For Excerpt
	function awesome_excerpt($text, $raw_excerpt) {
	    if( ! $raw_excerpt ) {
	        $content = apply_filters( 'the_content', get_the_content() );
	        $text = substr( $content, 0, strpos( $content, '</p>' ) + 4 );
	    }
	    $text = preg_replace("/<img[^>]+\>/i", "", $text); 
	    return $text;
	}
	add_filter( 'wp_trim_excerpt', 'awesome_excerpt', 10, 2 );

I'm using this so that on my main blog (`index.php`) it pulls the first paragraph of the article. When you click on an article you see Related Posts, this is where I want to limit the character count.