Text Input Word Count ?

I am trying to build an asp page the displays 100 characters from text inputed into a text area. The page keeps breaking because it counts any HTML code the text might have. I would like to have it count the words instead and when I write out the words it includes any underlying html.

For example, here is a sentence: "The fox jumps over the lazy dog" and I could cut this sentence in half by counting out the first 18 character and only outputing those respectively. Everything would work just fine. But if the sentence is like this "The fox jumps <a href='http://www.microsoft.com' target='_blank'>over</a> the lazy dog." a simple letter count no longer works for me. If I printed out the first 18 characters then it will break my "href" tag and therefore would mess up the formatting of my page. Can someone point me to an article or component that will assist me in correcting this?