Code Snippet - Extracting Meta Descriptions

On Saturday I spent some time working on my new website, which will one day be finished, and decided that it needed to extract a Meta Description from the Database for each page, to help provide search engines with suitable descriptions. Now the easiest way is to just have a field in your database and admin / cms system for this, however when you don't want a specific description from the database it would be useful for the page to instead pull 20 words from the body text. So i decided to write myself a small function that would strip out any HTML and return a specified number of words from a string input. I have included it below with a possible use, in this case Meta Description.

   public string extractWords(string input, int wordNum)
   {
       string output = "";
       int i;
       int maxi;
       input = Regex.Replace(input, @"<[^>]*>", string.Empty);
       Array words = input.Split(new char[] {' '});
       if (words.Length < maxi =" words.Length;" maxi =" wordNum;" i =" 0;" output="" return="">

Example

       if (pageContent[0]["metadescription"].ToString() != ""){
           stringDescription = pageContent[0]["metadescription"].ToString();
       }
       else{
           stringDescription = extractWords(pageContent[0]["body"].ToString(), 20);
       }