Cutting Text / Delete HTML from value

Hello everyone

I'm new in CF, using PHP usually, and I have a problem now ;)

For a newsletter, I'd like to have a pretext. It uses the complete newstext, which is in a database. What should happen now:
1) Cutting away all the html tags (because the newsletter may have HTML tags in it)
2) Read the string into an variable, using the first 200 characters + the characters until the next space.

in PHP it's quite easy, and there is also a function to cut HTML-Tags away from a string. And I guess, there's one in CF too.
Maybe you can help me :)

Thanks
Greets
KlyX