Return Match Using Regex

I have been working on this for a few hours and am frustrated
beyond all extent. I have tried to research this on the web as well
with no success. I am trying to match certain contents within a
wrapper div. So for example if the inside of the wrapper div was the
following:

<div id="wrapper">
<a href="#">a great link that contain text and symbols</a>
<div... </div>
<div... </div>
</div>

I would like to strip out all the internal div's. But because there
can be alot of internal div's, I figured it would be less processor
intensive to just match the first 'a' tag and repopulate the wrapper
div with the match. I am trying to use something like the following
regex:

re = /^<a(.+)</a>/;

with the following statment:

$temp = document.getElementById('wrapper').innerHTML.match (re);

but this is returning the entire contents of the wrapper div. I have
tried variations of the regex and either continue to get the entire
contents or null returns. Any help would greatly be appreciated.
BTW, I can't match to the first because the contents may be touching (ie ...</a><div>...).