I think what you were trying to accomplish is:

$remainder =~ s/<a[^>]*>//i;
[download]

That won't remove the end tag or the stuff in between though.

You might want to look at HTML::LinkExtor, HTML::Parser, and HTML::TokeParser to do these kind of things reliably.

Update: due to the discussion below, it dawned on me that I need a \b in order to avoid removing abbr tags (and one or two others that start with an "a".)

$remainder =~ s/<a\b[^>]*>//i;
[download]

the_pusher_robot++ for the clue.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";