Remove Link from author and date meta on Homepage of WordPress blog
<p>On my blog homepage, Author and date meta (Author name and date) are in link form. I want to show them only in text. When I tried to remove the link the text is also removed. Kindly help me to remove the link. Codes of display.php are</p>

<pre><code>if (!function_exists('swift_meta_generator')):
/**
 * Generate post meta.
 *
 * Prints the post meta information based on the options set in theme options page.
 * Called around post titles on home page and single pages.
 *
 * @param    array $meta post meta order set in options page.
 * @param    string $classes html classes for the post meta wrapper.
 *
 */
function swift_meta_generator($meta, $classes)
{
    $data = '&lt;div class="entry-meta ' . $classes . '"&gt;';
    $size = count($meta);
    for ($i = 0; $i &lt; $size; $i++) {
        switch ($meta[$i]) {
            case 'text' :
                if ((current_time('timestamp', 1) - get_the_date('U')) &lt; 86400)
                    $meta[$i + 1] = preg_replace('(on)', '', $meta[$i + 1]);
                $data .= $meta[$i + 1];
                $i++;
                break;

            case 'author' :
                $data .= '&lt;span class="vcard author fa-user"&gt;&lt;a class="" href="' . esc_url(get_author_posts_url(get_the_author_meta('ID'))) . '" rel="author"&gt;&lt;span class="fn"&gt;' . esc_attr(get_the_author()) . '&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/span&gt; ';
                break;

            case 'author_avatar' :
                $data .= get_avatar( get_the_author_meta('ID'), 16 );
                $data .= '&amp;nbsp;&lt;span class="vcard author"&gt;&lt;a class="" href="' . esc_url(get_author_posts_url(get_the_author_meta('ID'))) . '" rel="author"&gt;&lt;span class="fn"&gt;' . esc_attr(get_the_author()) . '&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/span&gt; ';

                break;

            case 'date' :
                if ((current_time('timestamp', 1) - get_the_date('U')) &lt; 86400)
                    $date = human_time_diff(get_the_time('U'), current_time('timestamp')) . ' '.__('ago','swift');
                else
                    $date = get_the_date();

                $data .= '&lt;span class="date updated fa-clock-o"&gt;&lt;a class="" href="' . esc_url(get_permalink()) . '" title="' . esc_attr(get_the_time()) . '" rel="bookmark"&gt;';
                $data .= '&lt;time class="entry-date" datetime="' . esc_attr(get_the_date('c')) . '"&gt;' . esc_html($date) . '&lt;/time&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/span&gt; ';
                break;

            case 'updated_on' :
                if ((current_time('timestamp', 1) - get_the_modified_date('U')) &lt; 86400)
                    $date = human_time_diff(get_post_modified_time('U'), current_time('timestamp')) . ' '.__('ago','swift');
                else
                    $date = get_the_modified_date();

                $data .= '&lt;span class="date updated fa-clock-o"&gt;&lt;a href="' . esc_url(get_permalink()) . '" title="' . esc_attr(get_post_modified_time()) . '" rel="bookmark"&gt;';
                $data .= '&lt;time class="entry-date" datetime="' . esc_attr(get_the_modified_date('c')) . '"&gt;' . esc_html($date) . '&lt;/time&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/span&gt; ';
</code></pre>