I'm using this code to extract text from the database and it works well but strips all the HTML tags.
$this->data['getshorty'] = utf8_substr(strip_tags(html_entity_decode($product_info['description'], ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8')), 0, 640);
I would much rather be able to extract the string with html tags included and then choose to stop at the first or second paragraph break instead of counting 640 characters. Is this do-able?