No subject

character-counting server-side, you may well need to include an
implementation of large parts of the W3C DOM specification. This is a
bit of a pain, for sure, but such libraries are available for most
languages now:

Ruby:            http://nokogiri.org/

Python:          http://docs.python.org/library/htmlparser.html
                 http://lxml.de/

Javascript/Node: https://github.com/tmpvar/jsdom

PHP:             http://php.net/manual/en/book.dom.php

Best wishes,
Nick