I don't know if this is robust enough for you. the gist is identify some
text with a regular expression, and replace that text with something else.
I use re-builder to help create the regexps.


#+BEGIN_SRC emacs-lisp
(let ((s " <div class=\"csl-entry\">Broder, John M., and Ian Urbina. “All
Eyes Turn to Virginia Senate Race.” <i>The New York Times</i>, November 9,
2006, sec. /. <a
href=\"http:hostname/url.\">http://hostname/url.</a></div>"))


  (setq s  (replace-regexp-in-string "\\(\.\\)\"" "" s nil nil 1))
  (setq s  (replace-regexp-in-string "\\(\.\\)</a>" "" s nil nil 1)))
#+END_SRC
#+RESULTS:
:  <div class"csl-entr">Broder, John M., and Ian Urbina. “All Eyes Turn to
Virginia Senate Race.” <i>The New York Times</i>, November 9, 2006, sec. /.
<a href"http:hostname/url">http://hostname/url</a></div>






John

-----------------------------------
Professor John Kitchin
Doherty Hall A207F
Department of Chemical Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
412-268-7803
@johnkitchin
http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu


On Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 9:36 PM, Matt Price <moptop99@gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm sorry to come with a basic elisp question, once again.
>
> I continue to work on this citation stuff.  Currently, I can get html back
> from Zotero in a form like this:
>
> -----------------
>   <div class="csl-entry">Broder, John M., and Ian Urbina. “All Eyes Turn
> to Virginia Senate Race.” <i>The New York Times</i>, November 9, 2006, sec.
> /. <a href="http://hostname/url.">http://hostname/url.</a></div>
> -----------------
>
> Note the final "." in the href -- this is a bug in the citeproc-js
> citation engine (I think).
>
> So, I would like to do some postprocessing and just remove the final ".".
> But it's not obvious to me how to do that.  I feel like it should be!  And
> that for an editor, emacs makes it awfully hard to match patterns & edit
> strings.  But I think that's partly because I simply understand lisp so
> poorly.
>
> If someone could show me how to do this, nad somehow along hte way make me
> understand hte basic principles involved so I can start to teach myself
> better...  well, I would appreciate it.
>
> thanks again,
> Matt
>