> 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

    /\<\*.+*/