I figured Perl's greedyness would allow .* to capture the entire string. Your suggestion worked (I changed a few things to make it work like I really need it to work):
$links1 =~ s/.*<\s*a\s*(href\s*=\s*".*?").*>.*/$1/is;
but out of curiosity, isn't there a simple regex to indicate the entire string that I can put on the left so I can specify what I want replaced on the right without memory brackets?

In reply to Re: Re: Substitution Problem by Wassercrats
in thread Substitution Problem by Wassercrats

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