I was recently updating a brochure that uses a numbered list style that includes a nested character style. Most but not all of the text includes a colon, and occasionally the text I received from the client had two spaces after the colon. After inserting the special character for “end nested style here” in 20 paragraphs, I went in with a GREP search that eliminates extra spaces and guess what! The end nested style character was seen as a space and was taken out. I tried again using a regular text search and replace and the same thing happened. I had to manually go in and put all those characters back where they belonged. Is there a way to let InDesign know that you don’t want to eliminate “special” characters when you want to eliminate regular extra spaces?
If not, the moral of the story is run the GREP search before putting in special characters!