character styles within character styles

[yea420]

Hi Everyone, thanks in advance for the help.

I'm importing xml into InDesign CS2. The problem I'm comming up against is character styles nested within other character styles. ie.

This is bold this is bold and italic and this is bold again.

In InDesign the italic over takes the bold and the sentence above reads

This is bold this is bold and italic and this is bold again.

Now I realize for this simple example the quick solution is to make a character style of bold_italic. However I'm looking at a list of 10 - 15 character styles that can be in any combination throughout my documents. After some quick math with only 4 character styles, I now need to make 14 to cover all my bases, with the number of character styles going up almost exponentialy with each addition.

There must be a better way,

Thanks

Spence