This, in some ways, follow on from the discussions on extracting the raw text from an HTML source (see the How to get HTML::Parser to return a line of parsed text thread.

What I would like to do is to extract the first n words of printable data from a string of HTML text.

Using the code: 

    # Create a new, empty, scalar
    my $text = "";

    # Define what the parser does
    my $p = HTML::Parser->new(
                    text_h => [ sub {$text .= shift},
                                'dtext'
                              ]
                             );

     # .. and parse!
     $p->parse($full_text);

[download]

Based on this, it is quite easy to then get the first n words: 

     # now hack off the first lump of words
     @list_of_words = split /[ \t\r\f]+/,
                             $text,
                             $n;

[download]

However, how do I then correlate the words from @list_of_words to the start of the HTML text in $full_text?
(The plan being that I can do the "blah blah blah (more...)" thing...

Edit: chipmunk 2001-05-29

In reply to getting the first n printable words from a string of HTML by Anonymous Monk

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