Retrieving x number of words from text field?

Hello All, I have a page that displays a summary of records available for view. As part of that summary I'd like to be able to retrieve and display x number of words (perhaps 15 or 20?) excluding punctuation (as in, I want the punctuation to be present, but not to count towards the word total, so "this ... that" would be 2 words, not 3) as an intro to the text in that record. The tricky thing is (at least, it seems tricky to me) is that I would like all content within an "<a href="" class=""></a>" tag to be treated as a word. So, if I set the retrieval number to be 10 words, the following would hopefully be retrieved: "one two three <a href="http://www.awebsite.com" class="link">some text describing the site</a> five six seven eight nine ten" I think I could probably achieve this using a fairly brutish technique of working through the string of the text for each record character by character and keeping a word count, but I wondered if anyone could think of a more graceful / efficient approach? Any help very appreciated! Much warmth, Murray http://www.planetthoughtful.org Building a thoughtful planet, one snide comment at a time...