Special characters and string editing

I am trying to convert microsoft word formatted document to BBcode for easy copy and paste reasons. I came across multiple versions of this and am tweeking some to my needs. Right now I am trying to convert a paragraph from one font to bb code acceptable font. I found a line of code like this.

.Replacement.Text = "[font="Open Sans"]^&[/font]"

this almost works perfectly, it just happens to include the line break which i need to figure out how to get rid of so the format is a little cleaner.

But the question is, what the hell is the ^&.
I can see its function pulls in the original line, which is awesome, because then I can easily add the BB tags. (minis the line break issue) But what the hell IS the ^&. I cannot figure out what it is called so I can look up alternatives or related things.

My goal is to research the thing and figure out how to get rid of my line break issue, but I can't seem to figure out what the hell it is to research it. I mean it isn't in the API that i can find, and searching for special characters is not google happy. It isn't a wildcard. It is just some clever use of regex?

There is a feature with the MS Word Find and Replace to allow the user to include special characters/markers in either the search or replace text. Those characters look like ^w or ^#, for "any whitespace" and "any digit" respectively. See the full list here.

This special character that you've encountered, ^&, is the short-hand for repeating the find text. This can be handy when you want to include the find text into the replace text, but the find text is also using wildcards and might not be known until you execute the find & replace.

For example, a find and replace with find "Gold" and replace "^&en", would replace all "Gold" with "Golden". You could do the same find and replace with "<G[A-Za-z]{3}>" and "^&en" to not just match "Gold" but any 4-letter word starting with "G" and append them with "en".