return only specified number of words

Question

I have some HTML tagged text, which I want to output only 40 words of.

e.g.

<strong>This is an article </strong> containing 150 words with <a href="">HTML
</a>tags and I want to output only first 40 words. How to do this?

I am using nl2br right now, because it has EOLs. explode() and str_word_count take into account only regular words.

Answer 1

So after some googling I found what I was looking for (at this forum http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum88/10821.htm)

The function cuts specified number of characters from the string and then adds characters up to next space (to prevent cutting in the middle of a word).

function elliStr($string,$noChars) { 
    for ($i = 0; $i < strlen($string); $i++) { 
    $result = ($noChars+$i >= strlen($string) ? $string : ($string{$noChars+$i} == " " ? substr($string,0,$noChars+$i) : ""));
    if ( $result != "" ) {
        return nl2br($result);
        } 
    }
}