no workaround, afaik.
i don't think that it would be hard to implement in the search and replace dialog or in the scripter... but somebody has to do it...
it will almost certainly be done for 1.6 (at least for the scripter and importing filters!) but i'm not sure that somebody will backporting it to 1.4...
so, the workaround would be to find somebody in your neighborhood that can contribute it to scribus!
ciao
a.l.e