Ability to set excerpt length by characters rather than words

Hi there

I thought I would throw into the pot a request to have the ability to set excerpt length to be determined by the number of characters rather than words.

My reason for asking is primarily for the Japanese market.

Japanese text typically has no {space} characters in so even setting the excerpt length to 1 can lead to large chunks of text being displayed.

I have seen a few workarounds but to have this built into the core would be very useful for Japanese site managers.

I’m not sure but I suspect it would also be advantageous for other markets like China and Korea etc.

Any thoughts?

Cheers

Owen