Summary

Remove the fig refs from an entry such as, ...<figr figref="1">see figure 1</figr>... leaving just the text between them:

The syntax has been broken down into understanable sections below. This first section intructs Arbortext APP to search for <figr figref=", and then any character excluding a closing chevron >. The * means match the preceding regular expression as many times as possible before continuing with remainder of the pattern.

Now search for any characters until you see an opening chevron < there could be many characters before the next open chevron so the * is again present to repeat this search. The parenthesis are there to indicate this is a group that will be used later for the replacement text.

Replace the searched text with the result found in group 1.