remove content on string

I suspect that:

$line=~ s/<a href=\"([^\"]+)>[^<]+<\/a>.*$/$1/mg;

may be closer.

Not to beat a dead horse here, but if there are multiple links on a line like the following :

text here <a href="http://somelink.com/somedir/">some test </a> text here <a href="http://www.boston.com">asdf</a>
or
text here <a href="http://somelink.com/">some text </a> text here
or
text here <a href="http://somelink.com/somedir/page.html">some text </a> text here

you should try these modifications to clockwatcher's :

#! /usr/local/bin/perl

while($line = <>) {

    @matches = $line =~ m#"(http://[^"]*)"#gi;
    foreach $item (@matches) { print "$item\n"; }

}