[How To] Limit Characters in content

I wanted to limit the amount of characthers being shown on my custom page, and i wanted to remove blockquotes, [caption] and images also.

Put this into your functions.php file in your theme directory.

function content($num) {
$theContent = get_the_content();
$output = preg_replace('/<img[^>]+./','', $theContent);
$output = preg_replace( '/<blockquote>.*<\/blockquote>/', '', $output );
$output = preg_replace( '|\[(.+?)\](.+?\[/\\1\])?|s', '', $output );
$limit = $num+1;
$content = explode(' ', $output, $limit);
array_pop($content);
$content = implode(" ",$content)."...";
echo $content;
}

and just echo it out in your theme inside the loop:
<?php content('20'); ?>