Question

I need to replace links in html:

<a href="http://example.com"></a>

To just plain-text url address:

http://example.com

UPD. Some clarification here, i need this to strip down html tags from text but preserve link locations. It’s purely for internal use, so there won’t be any crazy edge-case code.
Language is python in this case, but i don’t see how’s that relevant.

Answer 1

>>> s="""blah <a href="http://example.com"></a> blah <a href="http://www.google.com">test</a>"""
>>> import re
>>> pat=re.compile("<a\s+href=\"(.*?)\">.*?</a>",re.M|re.DOTALL|re.I)
>>> pat.findall(s)
['http://example.com', 'http://www.google.com']
>>> pat.sub("\\1",s)
'blah http://example.com blah http://www.google.com'

for more complex operations, use BeautifulSoup