Generating Abstract Text from HTML content

In the world of online content management, we often want to introduce an article with a summary or abstract. The best example of this is the front page of a blog. You are presented with a list of the most recent articles with just a few paragraphs from each to get your interest. If want to continue you can click through and get the full text. Until recently, this blog didn't do that. It's a pretty important addition for me because my posts tend to run long, and my Home Page was getting pretty lengthy from just 3 posts. Here's the rundown on adding this feature.

A Few Requirements

First a little setup. Ideally this summary would be written specifically for the article and formatting nicely for it's space in the page. But since we live in the real world, we are generally given a few requirements for our system to make this easier. These are the general guidelines I used:

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