Wildcard search does not work on Mail Merge Fields (MS Word)

Question

I wonder whether anyone ran into this issue before - I spend a dozen of hours but could not figure out.

I am writing a Word AddIn in C++. The AddIn is to convert anything between < and >. It works just fine for plain text, but does not work on Mail Merge fields.

For example, worked if I typed it, but if the same 'Jane' came from a mail merge field, it did not find the match.

I thought that some code is incorrect, but the same thing happended when I use the Find in Word.

The wildcard to search is \<*>.

However, searching plain text in mail merge fields works just fine. Any ideas?