In the spirit of heeding your username, I shall engage.

In markdown, if you use a single asterisk it doesn't mean much unless it's part of a list. However, if you use two, it will italicize the text between them. Britain, for example, would bring Brtan because the T and A (yes, I'm aware of the abbreviation) would be between them.

edit: Seven days later, I saw this post again. I realize now you weren't talking about the formatting but how many instances of the offending character to replace, like non global stream editing or sort of like ƒ.