Easiest way to remove Latex tag (but not its content)?

Question

I am using TeXnicCenter to edit a LaTeX document.

I now want to remove a certain tag (say, emph{blabla}} which occurs multiple times in my document , but not tag's content (so in this example, I want to remove all emphasization). What is the easiest way to do so?

May also be using another program easily available on Windows 7.

Edit: In response to regex suggestions, it is important that it can deal with nested tags.

Edit 2: I really want to remove the tag from the text file, not just disable it.

Answer 1

any reasonably advanced editor should let you do a search/replace using regular expressions, replacing emph{bla} by bla etc.

Answer 2

Using a regular expression do something like s/\\emph\{([^\}]*)\}/\1/g. If you are not familiar with regular expressions this says:

s -- replace
/ -- begin match section
\\emph\{ -- match \emph{
( -- begin capture
[^\}]* -- match any characters except (meaning up until) a close brace because:
  [] a group of characters
  ^ means not or "everything except"
  \} -- the close brace
  and * means 0 or more times
) -- end capture, because this is the first (in this case only) capture, it is number 1
\} -- match end brace
/ -- begin replace section
\1 -- replace with captured section number 1
/ -- end regular expression, begin extra flags
g -- global flag, meaning do this every time the match is found not just the first time

This is with Perl syntax, as that is what I am familiar with. The following perl "one-liners" will accomplish two tasks

perl -pe 's/\\emph\{([^\}]*)\}/\1/g' filename will "test" printing the file to the command line

perl -pi -e 's/\\emph\{([^\}]*)\}/\1/g' filename will change the file in place.

Similar commands may be available in your editor, but if not this will (should) work.