Thank you Walt for the detailed response. I'm actually much more familiar with regex than I am publisher documents so by the time I got to your reply I had already built an external text processing tool and rebuilt the pages based on that output. I missed the regex option in Publisher as it didn't occur to me to just set unique text markers in the frames. Duh... I over engineered a solution when there was an easy one sitting right there.
Hopefully in the future they as scope to the Find & Replace features, but this is a solid work around. Or better yet, a scripting interface for automation throughout the suite.
Thanks