Removal of <p> and </p> tags around data ??

You can try to fix html code before saving it to database, file etc. using regular expressions, for example in PHP:

$text = preg_replace("/^<p.*?>/", "",$text);
$text = preg_replace("|</p>$|", "",$text);

(this will remove only <p> tags surroundig the whole text *.)

$text = preg_replace("/<p(.*?)>/", "<div$1>",$text);
$text = str_replace("</p>", "</div>",$text);

(this will replace all <p> tags into <div>)

* - this solution is valid only if there is one <p> tag surrounding the whole text, like for example "<p>text</p>".
For more complex strings like "<p>text1</p><p>text2</p>", it will return "text1</p><p>text2", so additional check is required.
So the real solution would be to do a search for </p> tags and do a replacement only if only one closing </p> tag is found.

There is slight difference between PHP and Coldfusion in handling regular expressions.
In PHP, first char defines closing tag for regular expression, thus /<p.*?>/ is equal to <p.*?> in ColdFusion.

<cfset test1="<p>This is just a test</p> <p>Let me know how it works</p>">
<cfset test1=rereplace(test1,"^<p.*?>","","all")>
<cfset test1=rereplace(test1,"</p>$","","all")>
<cfoutput>#test1#</cfoutput>

Will output
This is just a test</p> <p>Let me know how it works
As you see, you must add additional checks here (whether <p> tags exists inside text). If, after replacing starting and ending <p> tag with the code above, there are still some <p> tags, simply use
the original text.

Second example (replace all <p> tags with <div>, Coldfusion version):

<cfset test1="<p>This is just a test</p> <p>Let me know how it works</p>">
<cfset test1=rereplace(test1,"<p(.*?)>","<div\1>","all")>
<cfset test1=rereplace(test1,"</p>","</div>","all")>
<cfoutput>#test1#</cfoutput>