substr() but ignoring html code

[waverider303]

I have a database of of blog posts and I want to display only a handful of characters from the post. I know of substr and all those but is there a way to have it ignore html code. MY content in the database includes <p> and <span> tags. I dont want substr to count those as characters so that it wont cut out some of my code.

[vinpkl]

you can strip those tags

 

http://php.net/manual/en/function.strip-tags.php

 

or you want to have those tags inside your content but dont want to count them.

 

vineet

[waverider303]

I want to include them but do not want them to count.