The other day, I had a text document, copied into Word from an ancient word-processing program (developed just as cuneiform was declining), in which words or phrases to be italicized in a some other conversion were enclosed in curly brackets, either {single} or {{double}}. While I finally discovered how to search for a bracket by using its ASCII code (Unicode didn't work), I was unable to craft syntax for both find and replace fields allowing the equivalent of the asterisk (any number of characters) to be used as a replacement for anything inside such brackets, so that I could, in a single-stroke, as it were, italicize all such instances and remove the brackets at the same time. I don't know if this is possible in F&R or would require a multi-step macro.



I did the job manually in this case but would love to know how to set this up so that I can be efficient next time. I studied Graham Mayor's and Greg Maxey's sites; perhaps the answer is there and I simply didn't grasp it.