Help needed with maxWords and image in RSS feed

Hi all,

I am attempting to create RSS feeds which will auto update social media sites, everything was going fine until I added  code to limit the number of words as I wanted to have viewers on social media to have to read the full article from our website. All was fine with that  except the maxWords resulted in the image being removed from the output.

As I see it I need the maxWords code to ignore any image present in its calculations or I need to use a seperate upload but if I use a seperate upload I dont know how to include it within the RSS output.

Any help would be appreciated.  I have attached my current RSS code below.

<?php
  /* STEP 1: LOAD RECORDS - Copy this PHP code block near the TOP of your page */
  
  // load viewer library
  $libraryPath = 'cmsb/lib/viewer_functions.php';
  $dirsToCheck = array('/home/sites/lpl-testsite.co.uk/public_html/','','../','../../','../../../');
  foreach ($dirsToCheck as $dir) { if (@include_once("$dir$libraryPath")) { break; }}
  if (!function_exists('getRecords')) { die("Couldn't load viewer library, check filepath in sourcecode."); }

  // load records from 'current_news'
  list($current_newsRecords, $current_newsMetaData) = getRecords(array(
    'tableName'   => 'current_news',
    'orderBy'     => 'Date',   // use default database order
    'loadUploads' => false,
    'allowSearch' => true,
    'where' => " category = 'Entertainment' ",
  ));

?>
<?PHP
function maxWords($textOrHtml, $maxWords) {
$text=str_replace("<p>","*P*",$textOrHtml);
$text= str_replace("</p>","*/P*",$text);
$text = strip_tags($text);
$words = preg_split("/\s+/", $text, $maxWords+1);
if (count($words) > $maxWords) { unset($words[$maxWords]); }
$output = join(' ', $words);
$output=str_replace("*P*","<p>",$output);
$output=str_replace("*/P*","</p>",$output);
$output.="...</p>";

return $output;
}
?>
<?php header('Content-type: application/xml; charset=utf-8'); ?><?php echo '<'.'?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>'; ?>
<rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <title>Bridlington Entertainment</title>
    <link>http://www.lpl-testsite.co.uk/</link>
    <description>Whats on Guide for Bridlington</description>
    <pubDate><?php echo date('r') ?></pubDate>
    <language>en-us</language>

    <?php foreach ($current_newsRecords as $record): ?>
    <item>
      <title><?php echo htmlencode($record['title']) ?></title>
      <link>http://<?php echo $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']; ?><?php echo $record['_link'] ?></link>
      <description>  <![CDATA[<?php echo maxWords ($record['content'],60) ?> <a href="http://<?php echo $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']; ?><?php echo $record['_link'] ?>" target="_blank">Read more..</a>]]></description>
      
      <pubDate><?php echo date('r', strtotime($record['createdDdate'])) ?></pubDate>
      <guid isPermaLink="false"><?php echo $record['_link'] ?></guid>
    </item>
    <?php endforeach ?>
  </channel>
</rss>