Saving GREP Queries for Reuse and Sharing
GREP is what I call a “write-only” language: it’s easy enough to create a GREP expression, but sometimes very difficult to look at an expression and work out exactly what it does, especially if it’s been more than a few days since you created it. So whenever I find a useful bit of GREPness here at InDesignSecrets, in InDesign Magazine, or elsewhere, I save it. Here’s how.
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Great tip about adding comments. GREP queries are so handy that it’s easy to come up with so many that the list becomes unwieldy, but it’s hard to recall what each one does unless you use it regularly. Names can only hold so much information. It would be nice to have a Description field in the Find/Change dialog, but at a minimum, it would be helpful if comments in the XML could be read and displayed in the dialog.
A faster way to get to your saved GREP queries — the XML files — is to right-click on the User folder in the Scripts panel (Window > Utilities > Scripts) and choose Reveal in Finder (or Reveal in Explorer in Windows).
You’re brought directly to your user account’s Scripts folder. Go up one level in the folder hierarchy to the parent folder, en_US (or whatever language you’re running) and you’ll see all the different user folders like Glyph Sets, AutoCorrect, and of course, Find-Change Queries.