Regexp To IGNORE Html

I need to truncate a news article to only show a certain number of characters on the front page. the news articles often contain html and the characters in the html are being counted. So, even though I want the text to be truncated at, say, 350 characters, the final result on the page looks like it's been truncated way further up, because the text of the html added to the character count.

here's the code i'm using to truncate

URLFunction ChopLastWord( Line, Length )
If Len(Line) < Length Then
ChopLastWord = Line
Exit Function
End If
Dim spaceat
spaceat = InStrRev( Line, " ", Length )
If spaceat < Length-20 Then spaceat = Length ' value of 20 is arbitrary
ChopLastWord = Left( Line, spaceat ) & "..."
End Function