Find/replace wildcard in Pages-app

The Find/Replace facility in Pages does not support regular expressions or wildcards because it is not a Word clone. That is why Word (or LibreOffice Writer) come in handy. Sometimes, I export the Pages document to DOCX and use either of those applications that do support RE in their Find/Replace. Then I open the DOCX in Pages again.

The Pages product team chose not to implement advanced features in Find/Replace and that has omitted regular expressions and wildcards. Apple's product teams do not participate here so any "why" in this response remains their design decision secret.

Since it was introduced in 2005, and rewritten/reintroduced in 2013, there has never been RE support in Pages.

Since Apple's design goal was for consumers, not professionals, and because they were not attempting to create a Word clone, RE was never implemented. Nothing to do with corporate spite at all.

Need RE, then use the products that support it.

EPUB creation in Pages is a post-processing export phase of the Pages document content. Regular Expressions (RE) might be a nice edition to the Pages application and document creation process, but I fail to see how RE would have any role in the actual EPUB generation from the Export panel.

The lack of RE in Pages won't be solved in these user to user exchanges. It is about using the tools that you require to get the job done, and Pages may not be that tool for you.

Apple's failure to support the RE function in Pages is annoying, to say the least, and inexcusable. Out of corporate spite?

I stand rebuked. Still, since Pages supports Apple ebook creation, it doesn't seem logical to me at least that it doesn't include RE. Just saying.