In a few places I have code that takes a significant piece of text, such as a knowledgebase article, and splits a small section from the beginning as an abstract. The code I generally use came from an answer to Splitting long text for Template

But now, for a different application, I want to create an abstract of text which may contain HTML tags. The problem comes with not wanting to split an HTML tag in two. I want either all of it or none of it. So this is the code I am using... 

sub abstract {
    my $text = shift;
    if (length $text > 200 and $text =~ /^(.{0,200}\b)(.*)$/s) {
        $text = "$1...";
    }
    
    # Check we have not split an HTML tag
    my $lt = $text =~ tr/<//;
    my $gt = $text =~ tr/>//;
    if ($lt != $gt) {
        my ($keep, $strip) = $text =~ /(.*)<(.*)/;
        $text = "$keep...";
    }
    
    return $text;
}

[download]
It does exactly what I want.

However, I cannot help thinking that the code could be more succinct...
Can you suggest a better way to do it?

In reply to Creating an abstract by Bod

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


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