html - regular expression to remove links

Regex is generally a bad solution for HTML parsing, a topic which gets discussed every time a question like this is asked. For example, the element could wrap onto another line, either as

  href="[variable content]">X

or

X

What are you trying to achieve?

Using JQuery you could disable the links with:

$("a.development").onclick = function() { return false; }

or

$("a.development").attr("href", "#");