Want to add links back into excerpts, can do paragraphs so far

I found a helpful function to put paragraph tags back into excerpts on the front page posts. It expands the word count to 100. I also want to put links back into the excerpts, but I’m not versed enough to modify this code.

I assume this line –- $text = strip_tags($text, '<p>'); — keeps the paragraph breaks in. Here’s my question: How do I modify this so that <a> tags are also kept?

I tried $text = strip_tags($text, '<p>', '<a>'); but that broke the site for a moment.

The full function used:

function my_custom_excerpt($text) {
	global $post;
	if ( '' == $text ) {
		$text = get_the_content('');
		$text = apply_filters('the_content', $text);
		$text = str_replace('\]\]\>', ']]>', $text);
		$fulltext = str_replace('\]\]\>', ']]>', $text);
		$text = strip_tags($text, '<p>');
		$excerpt_length = 100;
		$words = explode(' ', $text, $excerpt_length + 1);
		if (count($words) > $excerpt_length) {
			array_pop($words);
			array_push($words, '... <a href="'. esc_url( get_permalink() ) . '">Read more »</a>');
			$text = implode(' ', $words);
		}
		else {
			$text = $fulltext;
		}
	}
	return $text;
}
remove_filter('get_the_excerpt', 'wp_trim_excerpt');
add_filter('get_the_excerpt', 'my_custom_excerpt');

Thanks for any help.