Split HTML after N words in python

Question

Is there any way to split a long string of HTML after N words? Obviously I could use:

' '.join(foo.split(' ')[:n])

to get the first n words of a plain text string, but that might split in the middle of an html tag, and won't produce valid html because it won't close the tags that have been opened.

I need to do this in a zope / plone site - if there is something as standard in those products that can do it, that would be ideal.

For example, say I have the text:

<p>This is some text with a 
  <a href="http://www.example.com/" title="Example link">
     bit of linked text in it
  </a>.
</p>

And I ask it to split after 5 words, it should return:

<p>This is some text with</p>

7 words:

<p>This is some text with a 
  <a href="http://www.example.com/" title="Example link">
     bit
  </a>
</p>

Answer 1

Take a look at the truncate_html_words function in django.utils.text. Even if you aren't using Django, the code there does exactly what you want.

Answer 2

I've heard that Beautiful Soup is very good at parsing html. It will probably be able to help you get correct html out.