On the last SDL Tridion Community Webinar, Dominic Cronin suggested a great alternative to Regex for finding, adding, removing, or replacing certain elements or attributes, such as Component Links within Components (or Pages). The more data-safe approach is to manipulate the Component source as an XML document [via XPath] rather than regex. I gave it a shot, except that getting (what seems like) a simple XPath query to work took way more effort than I anticipated. All of this due to a little unknown detail about XPath queries for items in the default namespace without a prefix.
Using XPath to find XML Elements with Inline/Default Namespace and Null Prefix
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