Capturing regex groups in VS Code

See here for the original answer.

Use the following in your find and replace tool for the find portion:

<a[^>]*>(.[^<]*)</a>

Then use the capture group for the replace portion:

$1

What this does is looks for <a then any number of characters that are not the closing angle bracket (>). Next it matches all characters up until the next opening angle bracket (<), then looks for the closing </a>. Finally, all the characters in the middle are what is used to replace the matched text, thanks to the capturing group $1.