Javascript - Count characters of an anchor tag
<p>Basically I want to create a function that will search a string for an anchor tag, when it finds one, count the characters between  and return that number.  I am doing this for an editor that is counting the number of characters in a textarea because the textarea has a limit the user can enter and I don't want the characters in a link to count against that total.</p>

<p>If I have this in the textarea:</p>

<pre><code>This is what it looks like here &lt;a href="http://www.bmhl.com"&gt;Placeholder&lt;/a&gt;.  Please click the link to go to the page.
</code></pre>

<p>There are 32 characters prior to the anchor, 11 in between and 42 after for a total of 85.  In the anchor tag there are 34 characters that I don't want to go towards the count.</p>

<p>Hope that makes sense.</p>
