Comments on: GREP and Text Metacharacter Cheat Sheet

By: Martin Fischer

Martin Fischer — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 06:56:29 +0000

GREP with it’s wildcards would be very fine, if it would work without the known errors.

You know, wildcard-searches under Windows will find other things than on Mac (e.g. \s \w \l \u \d).

Posix [[:alnum:]] should be equivalent to [a-zA-Z0-9] and only find ASCII-characters, shouldn’t it? (http://www.regular-expressions.info/posixbrackets.html) But [[:alnum:]] will find non-ASCII-characters like Umlauts (äöü) or ? too. Under Win it will find ß and ligatures like ? and ? or œ (but not on a Mac).

If you are interested in what wildcards will find in InDesign under Win and on a Mac take a look at Gerald Singelmanns overview in http://indesign-faq.de/index.php/was-bedeuten-die-grep-wildcards-im-detail/

There you will find a PDF: http://www.indesign-faq.de/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/grep-wildcards.zip

Hope GREP wildcards will do their job better and equal under Win and on Mac in future releases of InDesign.

Martin Fischer

By: Carsten Pihl

Carsten Pihl — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 06:49:54 +0000

Since we still use CS2 (sic), anyone nows if the text-metacharachters work with cs2?

Nice to use in the find/change script that I use a lot.

By: johnny

johnny — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:13:29 +0000

this program is something like a science lab for people who really love GREP its currentlly PC only but it basically allows you you to PROGRAM and TEST any regex (aka GREP) search strings

http://www.regexbuddy.com/download.html

By: adam

adam — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 12:40:28 +0000

Thanks for the tip David. My find code wasnt nearly as elaborate as the Adobe one. Who would’ve thought [~m~>~f~|~S~s~<~/~,~3~4~% ]{2,} could save you so much time

By: Steve Bretschneider

Steve Bretschneider — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:59:43 +0000

I should add that TEX-EDIT PLUS is, for the present, a Mac-only application.

By: Steve Bretschneider

Steve Bretschneider — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:41:03 +0000

For anyone interested in doing their “GREPPING” outside of InDesign (who would want to do anything outside of InDesign?), there is a terrific shareware app called TEX-EDIT PLUS by Tom Bender.

I’ve used it for years to clean up text before pouring it into InDesign. It’s Cleanup Document tool has options to strip carriage returns/line feeds; leading & trailing spaces; replace multiple spaces with tabs; and a lot more.

But the really great feature is it’s Find & Replace which allows GREP searches and has a pull-down with a couple of dozen prebuilt searches.

I love the GREP feature in InDesign, but it’s nice to have an optional stand-alone application in your toolbox.

Steve

By: Eugene Tyson

Eugene Tyson — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:23:37 +0000

David, no problem about the code thing.

This is the link to the find between that could help

http://indesignsecrets.com/findbetween-a-useful-grep-string.php

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 12:59:31 +0000

@Eugene: Sorry about the code hassles. Yes, typing code into this site is tricky.

@Dave: If you’re using an OpenType font, you should check to see if it supports ordinals. For example, in Myriad Pro, you can just apply the Ordinal opentype formatting to the whole word “No” and it will format the “o” the way you want. Same with Garamond Premier Pro. But other fonts aren’t as helpful. In Minion Pro, both the N and the O are superscripted. Weird.

By: Eugene

Eugene — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 07:26:43 +0000

Ok tried to edit the above post and it lost all my grep stuff, even when wrapped in code so…

(?<=N)o(?=\s )

Will find all the “o” between a N and a space

If a digit comes after the o then replace the \s with \d

or if it’s a space and a digit then put in \s\d

By: Eugene

Eugene — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 07:18:57 +0000

Depends on whether a space comes after the o or a figure. I’m not sure what way it works there.

You need to find “No” but not include the N in the find.

To do this you need to do a positive lookbehind.

This GREP will find a “o” inbetween the N and a space

This one is for between an N and a space and a digit e.g., No 1


All yo have to do then is change the format to superscript, only the o will be affected.
You just have to figure out what comes in before the o and include it after the equals in this
(?<=)
And find out what comes after the o in No and insert it after the equals in this
(?=)
Whatever you put in the middle of the two of the above is what will be actually found.

I think Anne-Marie thought me that in another post on this site. Probably better explained too.