Limiting the amount of tags displayed beneath posts in Wordpress

For displaying tags, _s theme uses this function: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_the_tag_list

This saves me from a few extra lines of php but my goal is to limit the amount of tags displayed under a post.  Now I could always accomplish this in jQuery by hiding the extra ones, but I wouldn't be able to hide the seperators also and this isn't as efficient as through the actual loop.

So this is what I need to use instead: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_the_tags

And this is what I came up with to limit the tags to only four posts per post:
<?php
$tags_list = get_the_tags();
$tags = 0;
if ( $tags_list ) :
?>
<span class="tags-links">
<?php
foreach ($tags_list as $tag){
if ($tags < 4){
echo '<a href="'. home_url() . '?tag=' . $tag->name . '">' . $tag->name . '</a> ';
}
$tags++;
}
?>
</span>
<?php endif; // End if $tags_list ?>

$tags_list holds all the tags and $tags is used as our counter.  The rest of the code is pretty self explanatory.