alter the 26 (A-Z) parent links so that just the menu link text is displayed without its associated hyperlink Within Drupal 7 I have created an A-Z menu which contains all the links on the site organized alphabetically.  In addition to these links I have 26 additional parent menu links (A-Z) from which all the site links are organized as child links within these parent links.

I then use the sitemap module to display the contents of this menu within a page with a 3 column layout.  

My questions what is the most efficient way to programatically alter the 26 (A-Z) parent links so that just the menu link text is displayed without its associated hyperlink which I had to do originally when creating these links which by default I made as the homepage for all 26 parent links.
special menu items:

Special menu items is a Drupal module that provides placeholder and separator menu items.

A placeholder is a menu item which is not a link. It is useful with dynamic drop down menus where we want to have a parent menu item which is not linking to a page but just acting as a parent grouping some menu items below it.

https://drupal.org/project/special_menu_items