@Tex2002ans
Thank you very much for your detailed answer and explanation!! Much appreciated.
It worked pretty well for all 240 items.
On the remaining part of the text, I have numerous XVI that I wished to set to:
Code:
<span class="smcp">xvi</span>
I could reuse the second part of your search term for this:
Code:
<span class="smcp">\L\1\E</span>
I could check it on the wonderful site regex101 which implements also a PERL flavour.