OpenOffice Writer (or a similar program) may be useful for this. It would allow you to search by format while using a more controlled regular expression than MS Word's wildcards.

-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Matt Sherman
Sent: Tuesday, July 07, 2015 12:45 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Regex Question

Thanks everyone, this really helps.  I'll have to work out the italicized stuff, but this gets me much closer.

On Tue, Jul 7, 2015 at 12:43 PM, Kyle Banerjee <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> Y'all are doing this the hard way. Word allows regex replacements as 
> well as format based criteria.
>
> For this particular use case:
>
>    1. Open the find/replace dialog (CTL+H)
>    2. In the "Find what" box, put (<*>) -- make sure the option for "Use
>    Wildcards" is selected, and for the format, specify italic
>    3. For the"Replace box," just put \1 and specify All caps
>
> And you're done
>
> kyle
>
> On Tue, Jul 7, 2015 at 9:32 AM, Thomas Krichel <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
> >   Eric Phetteplace writes
> >
> > > You can match a string of all caps letters like "[A-Z]"
> >
> >   This works if you are limited to English. But in a multilingual
> >   setting, you need to watch out for other uppercases, such as
> >   крихель vs КРИХЕЛЬ. It then depends in the unicode implementation
> >   of your regex application. In Perl, for example, you would use
> >   [[:upper:]].
> >
> >
> > --
> >
> >   Cheers,
> >
> >   Thomas Krichel                  http://openlib.org/home/krichel
> >                                               skype:thomaskrichel
> >
>