Wordpress get_excerpt - show more words

the get_excerpt function on Wordpress shows the first 55 words of your post, striped out of any special formatting eg: links, bold, etc.  I wanted to change it for a blog I was developing so I traced it back to the function wp_trim_excerpt in the file \wp-includes\formatting.php. In this file you can change the value from 55 to , in my case 100. Just change the line 786 which should look like this  $excerpt_length = 55;

Please remember that this will change the default value for all you excerpts.