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You can do this by cut+paste to another RTF editor that supports them, but this does all kinds of horrid things if you want to reimport the text, like mess up tracked changes. Is there something like a plug-in that does this, or some feature that I am missing?

Postscript The PCRE functionality I miss most, from most missed to only rarely missed, are:

  1. Match against vertical whitespace - Word has some facility here, but it is limited;
  2. Zero-width expressions;
  3. Test for Unicode properties;
  4. Backreferences; and
  5. Non-greedy matches.
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"Match against vertical whitespace - Word has some facility here, but it is limited;" How are you doing that? – barlop Dec 23 '11 at 21:59
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The wildcards in Microsoft Word are bit like Regular Expressions. This article has more detail.

Standard Regular Expressions compare to Word Regular Expressions as follows:

  • . becomes ?
  • .* becomes *
  • * becomes @ - e.g. lo@t matches lot and loot
  • [] works the same in both
  • () works the same in both
  • \ escapes wildcards in both
  • \b becomes < and > for matching word boundaries
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These are very useful, and are good enough for most tasks. But they lack a lot PCRE functionality. I'll edit my post accordingly. – Charles Stewart Jan 19 '10 at 11:44
Naturally they lack PCRE functionality. I've been watching this question since it first appeared, thinking 'Perl Compatible Regular Expressions' in Word, you've got to be joking! Still, I've been wrong before (notably about Javascript support in PDF files) but I think a third party would have to add PCRE to Word, and PCRE suits text files, not the (basically) binary format of Word documents. – pavium Jan 19 '10 at 12:49
No, I think not: you can generalise most PCREs to the kind of regexp Word has, and then narrow that list to the ones that really match, using outside code. But this is a nontrivial coding task... I could ask on SO if no-one has any more straightforward ideas. – Charles Stewart Jan 19 '10 at 17:03
I'm accepting this, because I'm fairly sure now that the answer is "no", and that this is the best that can be said without new software being written. – Charles Stewart Feb 17 '10 at 9:22
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