How to count words in T-SQL excluding HTML tags

Question

Given a table where one column contains HTML, how can I get a word count for each row, excluding HTML tags? Basically I want to count how many words will ultimately be rendered in the browser.

Using SQL Server 2008 R2.

Answer 1

You could adapt this SQL function to parse delimited strings to split the string be spaces, and count words that way. It will be approximate, but if you need a more accurate count it will be easier using .net, parsing the page and getting the word counts from within the html nodes.