title: Removing markdown formatting for quick excerpt
body: <p>Anyone know of a script or already built function that will help me create a quick excerpt using already existing markdown formatted content?</p>
  
  <p>I am looking at formatting results like StackOverflow where I have the title, and a short excerpt, for basically news view.  I want to remove the markdown fully and just preserve the few words.</p>
  
  <p>My concern is that I am going to use a codeigniter helper <code>word_limiter()</code>to limit the output. Which may create broken markdown:</p>
  
  <pre><code>**This is a sentence which has some _markdown_ that is [cutoff..
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>So I'm not sure how to go about it.</p>
  
  <p>All my content is stored with markdown (not HTML formatting) otherwise I would do 'striptags' etc;</p>
  
  <p>I've found something similar for Ruby on SO here: <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/q/395783/158014">Truncate Markdown?</a>, but I would love something for PHP.</p>
  
  <p>I'm just not sure if I should just strip all <code>*_[]()&gt;</code> characters basically? But if there is a URL (split in half), I'm worried it will look nasty.</p>
  
  <p>Thoughts? I've looked around a bit, but at first glance haven't found anything that strips markdown. </p>