Regular Expression to extract inner text from anchor tags

Several days ago, someone at the forum has asked how to extract the text from a hyperlink and preserve other HTML tags. It sound interesting, I did some research but can't find the direct solution. So, I decide to put together a simple regular expression to execute the task.

Regular Expression: (<[a|A][^>]*>|</[a|A]>)

Explanation:

<[a|A][^>]*> -- Remove <a href="a.aspx">
</[a|A]> -- Remove </a> tag

Example 1:

string str1 = "<a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596528124/\" class=\"someclass\">Mastering Regular Expressions</a>
-- <A href=\"http://cnn.com/\">CNN</a> <div><a href=\"http://blog.ysatech.com\">http://blog.ysatech.com<;/a></div>";

str1 = System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Replace(str1, "(<[a|A][^>]*>|)", "");

C#

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Result: Mastering Regular Expressions -- CNN <div> http://blog.ysatech.com </div>

Example 2:

string str2 = "<div><a href=\"http://www.ysatech.com/\" class=\"someclass\">ysatech</a></div>";

str2 = System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Replace(str2, "(<[a|A][^>]*>|)", "");

C#

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Result: <div>ysatech</div>

Test this regular expression here.