Accessing iFrame Contents via jQuery in IE

I'm using jQuery to try and access the contents of an iframe WYSIWYG, just to get the character count and update a counter outside the iFrame. Oddly enough, my code works fine in in Firefox, but breaks in all versions of IE. Wondering if anyone could help me out with some IE-friendly syntax? Here's what I have so far:

This is in the onload function:

textCounterWYSIWYG('longDesc_cnt', 2000);

This is the function itself:

function textCounterWYSIWYG(text, limit) {
  var len = String($("iframe").contents().find("body").html());
  var trimmed = len.replace(/^\s+|\s+$/g, '');
  var length = trimmed.length;
  if (length > limit) {
    field.value = field.value.substring(0, maxlimit);
  }
  else {
    var rem = limit - len开发者_StackOverflow社区gth;
    $("#"+text).text(rem + " Characters Remaining");
  }
}

The var len = ... line is what seems to be breaking IE. Any thoughts/suggestions are highly welcome!

First thing I would try is to get the iframe by id rather than by tag name.

Also, I'd change that variable name "len" to something more relevant ;-).

Perhaps it is some default IE security settings? What WYSIWYG library are you using?