removeString: ActionScript 2.0 function to remove delimited strings

This function is quite useful.
It will remove strings that are delimited by known characters, any number of times from a target string. For example to remove all the markups in an XML node and just leave the text, call it with this snippet:

tempString = pNode.toString();
while (tempString.indexOf("<") != -1) {  
 tempString = removeString(tempString,"<",">");
}

function removeString(input:String, sDelim:String, 
            eDelim:String):String {
  var startIndex:Number = 0;
  var sDelimIndex:Number = input.indexOf(sDelim);
  var eDelimIndex:Number = input.indexOf(eDelim);
  var endIndex:Number = input.length-1;
  
  var output:String = "";
  
  if (input == undefined || 
    input == "" || 
    sDelimIndex != -1) {
    //get the substring before the delimiter, if any
    if (startIndex < sDelimIndex) {
      output += input.substring(startIndex,sDelimIndex);
    }
    if (eDelimIndex != -1) { // if any end delim 
    // get the substring after the delimiter, if any
      if (eDelimIndex < endIndex) {
        output += input.substring(eDelimIndex+1,endIndex+1);
      }
    }
  }
  else {
    //nothing to be done
    output = input;
  }
  return output;
}