Update: With the new releases of Views it is possible to do all the trimming and html stripping directly from the views UI.

While I was developing this website I run into the need of having total control over the teasers of my contents especially while using views to extract them.  Probably if you have just one content type you can manage it with the default option in drupal administration.

The simplest solution I have found is to use the neat_trim function. So what you have to do is just copy and paste the following function into your theme template.php file (just remember not to copy the "?>" php closure):