title: .net regex group that doesn't appear in matches
body: <p>is there a way to group a matching element but not have that match appear in the resulting match groups? for example, suppose I have a string with two lines:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;td&gt;text 1&lt;/td&gt;
  &lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=whatever&gt;this is&lt;/a&gt; text 2&lt;/td&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and I want to parse out "text 1" and "this is text 2". what I'm doing now is using this pattern:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;td&gt;(&lt;a href=.+?&gt;)?(.+?(&lt;/a&gt;)?.+?)&lt;/td&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>basically grouping the anchor tags so I can have the pattern match them zero or one time. I don't want those groups to appear in the match results (though I can easily ignore them). is there a proper way to do this?</p>