Output a post excerpt with out a link and with a specific character limit in Wordpress

functions.php

<?php

function limit_content($text,$numChar){
    $length = $numChar;
    if(strlen($text)<$length+10) return $text;//don't cut if too short

    $break_pos = strpos($text, ' ', $length);//find next space after desired length
    $visible = substr($text, 0, $break_pos);
    return balanceTags($visible) . "…";
}

/** * close all open xhtml tags at the end of the string

 * * @param string $html

 * @return string

 * @author Milian <[email protected]>

 */
function closetags($html) {

  #put all opened tags into an array

  preg_match_all('#<([a-z]+)(?: .*)?(?<![/|/ ])>#iU', $html, $result);

  $openedtags = $result[1];   #put all closed tags into an array

  preg_match_all('#</([a-z]+)>#iU', $html, $result);

  $closedtags = $result[1];

  $len_opened = count($openedtags);

  # all tags are closed

  if (count($closedtags) == $len_opened) {

    return $html;

  }

  $openedtags = array_reverse($openedtags);

  # close tags

  for ($i=0; $i < $len_opened; $i++) {

    if (!in_array($openedtags[$i], $closedtags)){

      $html .= '</'.$openedtags[$i].'>';

    } else {

      unset($closedtags[array_search($openedtags[$i], $closedtags)]);    }

  }  return $html;}
  
?>

page-template.php

<p class="limited-content"><?php echo closetags(limit_content(preg_replace("/\[caption .+?\[\/caption\]|\< *[img][^\>]*[.]*\>/i","",get_the_content(),1),300)); ?></p>