[Velocity] Get users from a list of users

I made a new class which have a property List of Users with the name “iao”.
If i access this property it return a full string with HTML tags from all users + the avatar.
How can i get only the Users without avatar from this property?
Thanks

No idea if there is a better solution but i just extracted the <a> HTML Tag with regex from the string.

Here the regex if someone need it:

$regextool.findAll($iaos, "<a(.|\n)*?<\/a>")