regular expression help

Hey all you PHP or regular expression gurus. I've got an if statement, that I'm thinking may be more efficient to run as a regular expression.

Basically, I'm checking if the word is longer than 5 chars, and if a '<' or '>' is present, to detect is the word is within an HTML tag. Here's what I have:

if (str_len($word) > 4 && strpos($word, ">") == -1 && strpos($word, "<") == -1)

PHP:

Any thoughts on the regex I would use?

Green rep for whoever can answer!

 

Not the prettiest, but:

if (preg_match('#\<[^<>]*'.preg_quote($word).'[^<>]*\>#si', $original_string))

PHP:

That will check for $word within an HTML tag in $original_string.

 

If the word between <> tags is 5 chars or longer?

if (preg_match('/<[\w]{5,}>/', $word))

PHP:

Or this if you want to check from the end to the beginning of the word, so that $word holds nothing else except the tag.

if (preg_match('/^<[\w]{5,}>$/', $word))

PHP:

\w matches A-Z a-z 0-9 and under scores. I think that's all a valid tag needs.

 

sorry. Let me explain myself better. I'm looking to exclude words shorter than 5 chars, and looking to exclude words that may be in or beside tags.

What I was going to do is explode a paragraph of text at " ", then loop through the array to examine each word. I want to ignore short words and words within or beside tags.

Is there a better way to do this with regex?