Matching anchor tags

[Ian Skinner-3]

I am trying to match everything in an anchor tag, except the target
property.  I have this regex:
<(/?)a([^>]*)target="[^"]*"([^>]*)>

Which is working well for the opening <a>nchor tag.  But it does not
match the closing tag because a closing tag does not have a target
property.  How would I make the entire 'target="[^"]" in the middle
optional?

I tried wrapping it in parenthesis and putting a '?' after it, but that
does not seem to work.
<(/?)a([^>]*)(target="[^"]*")?([^>]*)>

Thank You
Ian


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[Peter Boughton]

I can't figure out what you're attempting to do... can you re-explain
the aim of the expression?

Do you want to match the opening tag and the closing tag, or just one
or the other?
Are you attempting to remove/replace the target tag, or everything
except it, or something else?

A closing tag is just </a> - no need to complicate things unless you
need to link it to the related opening tag for some reason?

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