Actually Rev. Bob, the Kobo span's (at least in the books I examined) were of the form
<span id="kobo.114.1">...</span>, so my approach to looking for those was
Code:
<span ## look for <span
[^>]+? ## then one or more character that is not the closing >
## (there will always be at least one; the space after
## the <span )
id="kobo ## the start of the Kobo id assigned to this span
[\d.]+ ## the numeric and dotted span number
[^>]+? ## then everything up to the the >
## (always at least one; the " after the id)
> ## the closing symbol of the <span tag
which in theory should handle both the format I found and your example.