To avoid throwing stuff in $1 when you don't need to, there is a great feature called clustering in REs with the (?:stuff here) stuff :). Just change

/<a href="(mailto:)?([^"]*)">([^<"]*)<\/a>/g
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to

/<a href="(?:mailto:)?([^"]*)">([^<"]*)<\/a>/g

And that way nothing will be put in $1.

You may also want to consider chomping  $2 and $3 because a newline could get in there somewhere and cause some trouble.

Hope I helped out. :):):) Later

$_.=($=+(6<<1));print(chr(my$a=$_));$^H=$_+$_;$_=$^H;
print chr($_-39); # Easy but its ok.
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