Need to parse substring from a field that has html/css formatting

I am copying / pasting news articles into a cke editor that gets inserted into a sql dbase. At first , the field that I was inserting the data to is a varchar(max) type , and it preserves all the html/css formatting you copy over when inserting into the editor. Now I have turned the field for the articles into a basic varchar (4000) data type, and this doesnt disregard the html/css tags that come into it when inserting into the column. So what I am doing is displaying a partial first few sentences (around 80 characters ) of the news article on my page via data repeater, and this sql call : SELECT top 3 idcategory,SUBSTRING(newsarticle, 1, 80) as news80,title,idnews,date FROM news WHERE date <= '" + rightnow + "' and idcategory = 2 order by date desc ...on my data repeater coding on the aspx page, I have <span style="font-size:8px;"><%# Eval ("newsarticle") %></span>.. have tried to append this with ToStr ...