PHP: Truncate HTML, ignoring tags

I want to truncate some text (loaded from a database or text file), but it contains HTML so as a result the tags are included and less text will be returned. This can then result in tags not being closed, or being partially closed (so Tidy may not work properly and there is still less content). How can I truncate based on the text (and probably stopping when you get to a table as that could cause more complex issues).