Argthtjtr

As the title suggests I need to get X amount of characters from a string but HTML is not including in the count.

Example string

Some <i>t</i>est <b>string</b> test

9 characters would output

Some <i>t</i>est

13 characters would output

Some <i>t</i>est <b>str

19 characters would output

Some <i>t</i>est <b>string</b> te

I'm not too sure where to go from the basic

(.*?){0,10}

Also, is there a way to make HTML encoded characters e.g. < count as one character?

To match a certain amount of chars from the string start excluding substrings like <...> from the count and counting &XX*; entities as one unit, you may use

^(?:&[^s;]*;|(?:<[^<>]*>)*.){20}

See the regex demo.

Details

• 
  ^ - start of string


• 
  (?: - start of a non-capturing group that will serve as a containter for the alternatives below:
  
  
  
  
  • 
    &[^s;]*; - a &, 0 or more chars other than whitespace and ; and then ;
    
  
  
  • 
    | - or
  
  
  • 
    (?:<[^<>]*>)*. - 0 or more repetitions of <, 0+ chars other than < and > and then >, and then any char other than a line break char (use DOTALL modifier to match any char with .)
  
  
  
  


• 
  ){20} - end of the container group and the limiting quantifier tells the engine to match 20 consecutive occurrences of its pattern.