> Oddly, this results in a non-italicized asterisk in the output, contrary to reports in earlier comments that the resulting asterisk would be in italics. There

> Oddly, this results in a non-italicized asterisk in the output, contrary to reports in earlier comments that the resulting asterisk would be in italics. There is, however, a zero-length italicized string right before the asterisk in the HTML: > "Stocks rose today by <i></i>* percent". Sounds like the matching is something like /\<\*.*\*/ or maybe /\<\*[^*]*\*/ rather than /\<\*.+*/