No need to get all complicated and stuff...

And then you go on to do precisely that. With a "manual cleanup" and another script to boot. And I bet it would still break.

What is so hard about using a parser?

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use HTML::TokeParser::Simple;

my $p = HTML::TokeParser::Simple->new(*DATA);

my $html;

while (my $t = $p->get_token){
  
  next if 
    $t->is_start_tag('a')
      or
    $t->is_end_tag('a');
    
  $html .= $t->as_is;
  
}

print "$html\n";

__DATA__
<p>some text</p>
<a href="./somelink.html">This is a url :O </a>
<p>some more text</p>
[download]

output:

<p>some text</p>
This is a url :O 
<p>some more text</p>
[download]

Somebody else has done all the hard work why give yourself pain?

In my opinion using any regex on any html is the way to madness.

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