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:

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  <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>
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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