substring in php

Question

I've some html code

<p style="color:red;font-size:12px;">This economy car is great value for money and with the added benefit of air conditioning is ideal for couples and small families. A ?500 excess applies which can be waived to NIL for only <b>5.00</b> per day</p>

am using the following methods

substr($mytext,0,25);

and

$s = html_entity_decode($mytext);
$sub = substr($s, 0, 25);

But both of these are not working. 1st one returns an empty result and 2nd one returns the sting contains all the html codes..

Answer 1

 substr(strip_tags($mytext), 0, 25)

this wil show only first 25 characters with out displaying html

Answer 2

Make this:

echo (substr(strip_tags($mytext), 0, 25));

This strips all tags and shows you the first 25 chars of the given string.

Example: http://www.ideone.com/6TgJX