Wordpress Excerpt - How to remove the first link using functions.php

Question

I've just imported a blog into Wordpress and all of the content begins with:

<a href="itunes.com">Listen on iTunes</a>

followed by the paragraph content, so all excerpts appear with "Listen on iTunes content excerpt..."

I've tried a few custom functions found here, but none seem to do the trick. What's the best way to remove the Listen on iTunes text without having to move the iTunes link?

For example, I tried this... with no luck...

    function custom_excerpt() {
    $text = get_the_excerpt(); //Assigns the excerpt to $text
    $text = str_replace("Listen","", $text); // replacing the word with empty string
    $text = str_replace("on","", $text);
    $text = str_replace("iTunes","", $text);
    return $text;
}
add_filter('the_excerpt', 'custom_excerpt');

Answer 1

The way you are using the filter is wrong. Your function should accept the excerpt as an argument:

function custom_excerpt( $excerpt ) {

Then you don't need to do the get_the_excerpt() call, as you already have the value you want to edit. Furthermore, if you are replacing each word, one by one, you could hurt other parts of the excerpt, so I'd advise you to remove the whole sentence in a single call of str_replace().