Flagging Hyperlinks using search & replace?

[Ambreville]

Looking for Technical Advice:

I found out recently that hyperlinks in MS Word don't carry over into InDesign. They are lost in the conversion. My manuscripts of late include boatloads of hyperlinks meant to function as in a wiki document. Obviously I want to prevent the layout artist from having to manually enter them back into the text. That's my 800 lb gorilla today.

An idea that came up was to insert the letters (HL) just *before* hyperlinks, as a way to make it easy for the layout artist to zero in on the missing links (no pun intended) without going bananas. I tried using Word's search & replace function, looking for underlines (fortunately, I don't use underlines anywhere else but in hyperlinks). The trouble with this is that the entire underlined statement gets replaced with the (HL) entry, which entirely defeats the purpose. It's what I call a monkey wrench.

Digital peanuts haven't helped. It sounds like this is a job better handled with a Macro. I used to write those in my sleep back in the days of Wordperfect. Alas, MS Word uses a language making a chimp out of me. Does anyone have a better idea on how to approach this?

Thanks!!