<p>I just uploaded my first ASP.NET (as part of my learning of vb.net) and got into awful mess with the connection pooling (funny things happen when there are more than 1 user of your web site) all sorted now by better use of the try catch statements (well the idea was to learn) BUT I was wondering if this is the best / final method, now if the try fails, then a LOT of the detail on the page isn't placed/updated, so if you are doing some database work and the try fails, do you reload the page ... redirect to self and hope it work the next time ... or just inform the user there was a error and they should try again ?</p>

<p>Thanks</p>

You could create an app that looks for contiguous block of text disregarding formatting tags (if required).  You could do this by using a DOM parser and walking the tree, keeping track of the immediate parent (because that is your output).
Start form parent nodes and traverse the tree for each node that is just formatting, it would continue the 'count' within that sub block.  It would count the characters of the content.
Once you find the most content block, traverse back up the tree to its parent to get your answer.
I think your solution relies on how you traverse the DOM and keep track of the nodes that you are scanning.
What language are you using? Any other details for your project?  There may be language specific or package specific tools you could use as well.