[Plugin: Co-Authors Plus] Showing co-authors without links

Hello,

I cannot, after many hours of trying, get my co-author names to appear without any html. I don’t want any links at all. I need to figure out a way to add coathors to my meta tags. I’ve tried creating my own shortcode, and using strip_tags:

function mr_coauthor_names_shortcode() {
        if(function_exists('coauthors_posts_links'))
        $str = coauthors_posts_links(', ', ' and ', ' by ' , '');
        $out = strip_tags ( $str );
        return $out;
    else
        the_author_posts_link();
}

But it simply will not work. str_replace doesn’t even work. Hopefully you can help.

Just curious if you are going to update co-authors plus? Do you need funds?

Thanks.