Applying Bolds and Italics while doing a Find/Replace on Data Merged content

Question

Hi,
Wonder if you kind knowledgeable folks can help me with a Find/Replace question.
I am doing a data merge of a book contents into indesign, where my data merge file is a straightforward text csv file which is tab delimited. I have two (almost similar) things I would like to do to specific parts of the text but don't know how to achieve this. 
-  Firstly, I would like to preserve words/sentences with an 'italic' form but this is obviously lost in a csv file.  Is there anyway I can mark these words in order that a find/replace can make this word italics.  Im hoping there is a solution which resembles something like this;
eg.  Book content is "The Word Italic needs to be adjusted".
Original content is amended to be "The Word $Italic$ needs to be adjusted", so that a dollar sign encapsulates the word to be made Italic.
Then I am able to data merge the csv file and somehow do a find/replace of words/sentences which are encapsulated by the dollar sign.  Thus, doing a find/replace of all words/sentences which satisfy this condition and then apply italics to all words between the dollar signs.
- My other issue is I am using the '|' character in my text to determine the paragraph seperators.  I then do a find/replace after importing the text to replace all instances of '|' to the paragraph seperator (a kind of $ symbol, a representative character from the pop-up menu to the right of the Change To box). This works fine, but I'd like to make the paragraph seperator to be a BOLD format so that it can distinguish better the seperating sections of text.
But this is different from my 'italics' issue above since I am trying to apply a BOLD format to the 'Change to' character, rather than something which exists in my original csv.
Hope I make sense but I'd be happy to provide screenshots etc (when I get home )
Best Rgds
L

Answer 1

two solutions.
for the italic solution, i'd say the OP answered his own question with one exception - don't use dollar symbols, instead use = or another character which isn't reserved by GREP.
the solution i would use for italics would be a GREP search once the merge is complete. have a look at the picture to see what i've done.
the second solution: GREP styles.
this assumes that the text will have a paragraph style assigned to it. make a character style called BOLD and within that style, the only thing to change is within basic character formats, make the font style bold. could even make the character another colour such as cyan so it is more easily idenfiable.
next, go to the paragraph style options, go to GREP styles and match the following screengrab
the advantage with a GREP style is that once the pipe symbol (|) is replaced, its bold GREP style character formatting is lost; and it means less post processing and no need for a second search of the text - it's all live.