Clay has developed our first Expression Engine plugin, HTML_Limit, which is a character limit function that is HTML aware and will close element properly. This extension is compatible with ExpressionEngine 2.x but it hasn’t been tested on the 1.x series. If you’re looking for similar functionality on the old system, do a google search for trunchtml.

Using the HTML Character Limit:

Wrap anything you want to be processed between the tag pairs, can be variable text or plain text. HTML Character Limiter will automatically detect valid html tags and ignore them in the character count as well as close them properly. The “chars” parameter lets you specify the number of characters and “suffix” lets you append whatever text to the end (before any closing element tags).

{exp:html_limit chars="100" suffix="..."}{body}{/exp:html_limit}

Download: HTML Character Limit (149)