title: ignore character within html tags while counting characters
body: <p>in my current template, i have a large block of text that comes in from the user. the block is then split at the 600 character mark and placed into a specific div on the page, the rest of the block is placed near the bottom of the page. this works fine, but a problem arises when there are a lot of links added near the beginning of the post. </p>
  
  <p>the <code>&lt;a href='...'&gt;&lt;/a&gt;</code> is being counted towards the total character count. i always want to split the block at 600.</p>
  
  <p>is there an easy way for me to find out the length of the html characters? that way I can just add them to the split_length. or any other ideas? ways to ignore the html characters entirely? </p>
  
  <p>edit:
  i should be clear i WANT the links to stay...</p>