expect a lot of answers directing you towards various html scrubbers and token parsers, but here is the dirty regex: 
  s{(?:<a\s[^>]+>)([^<]+)(?:</a>)}{$1}g;

[download]
there are a lot of assumptions in there, like the link label doesn't contain < (ie, <img>), there are no line breaks, HTML is well-formed, no embedded comments (<a <!--oops--> href="">...</a>), etc, etc. but if all your use cases are like the example there, it will work.

In reply to Re: Replacing Text by mreece
in thread Replacing Text by pyro.699

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
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