InDesign search multiple formats at once in find and replace

Question

I am pretty new to InDesign and InDesign forums.  I am having problems figuring out how to do this task.  I am using CS6, and  I have a rather large document that has a glitch in the formatting.  The Latin names for species are in italics, but for some reason the space between them is not always in italics, and this is creating havoc with indexing the species.  In the first name below the space is italicized, and in the second it is not, so the whole name cannot be indexed because the italics is the key to creating the index.  I need to change the space between italic words to be italicized, but I cannot figure out how to use multiple format types within one find command to do this. I need to search out an italics word or wild card and un-italicized space and italics word or wild card and change it to all italics. Does anyone have any advice?  I greatly appreciate your time.
Epinotia aceriella
Sparganothis pettitana
Thank You!
Maggie

Answer 1

The basic idea would be to do a few GREP search and replaces:
1. Search for any character at the end of a word formatted in italics.
2. Replace with that character + some symbol that isn't used in the
book, say @ (careful of email addresses)
3. Search for any character at the beginning of a word formatted in italics
4. Replace with same character as in (2)
5. Do a regular search for @ @ and change to italics formatting.
6. Delete all @
The GREP search for (1) might be:
(.)\>
The GREP replace for (2) might be:
$1@
The GREP search for (3) might be:
\<(.)
The GREP replace for (4):
@$1
etc.