Word count excluding HTML tags

I would suggest beginning by 'exploding' the string with something like preg_match. That would allow you to look for something that starts with a less than symbol [ ^< ], plus [ + ] ends with a greater than symbol [ $> ].

regular expression are a really cool thing, but they aren't needed here because of PHP's great set of standard functions:

$count = str_word_count(strip_tags($yourtext));

don't forget to checkout the manual on these 2 ones:

[php.net...]
[php.net...]

--hakre