Join Michael Murphy for an in-depth discussion in this video Backreferences in search queries, part of Learning GREP with InDesign.
There's a little-known feature you can take advantage of in GREP Find/Change,…that's not documented anywhere in InDesign's Help files, and that's the ability…to use a back reference to find duplicate information in text and eliminate it.…When text is marked by a subexpression in the Find what field, you can refer to…it in the Change to field with one of the found text metacharacters, like found…text 1 for the first subexpression, found text 2 for the second, and so on.…But you can also refer to those subexpressions within the same expression in…the Find what field.…
This is what's called a back reference.…Let's take a look at an example.…In this file, there is a list of addresses and I've noticed that in some of them…some of the information has been entered twice.…I have two address lines for this address here, and here, and another one over here.…So there is at least those and possibly some more.…Now there aren't a whole lot in this document, so I could conceivably go in and…clean them up myself.…
Author
Michael Murphy
Released
11/18/2009- Using metacharacters, the building blocks of GREP
- Describing text that may not exist with zero operators
- Applying multiple character styles to the same text with GREP styles
- Eliminating orphaned words at the ends of paragraphs
- Preserving and recalling subexpressions
- Customizing a GREP-based text cleanup script for long documents
Skill Level Intermediate
Duration
Views
Q: In the “Dynamically fixing orphaned words with GREP” tutorial the author uses the term:
(?<=\w)\s(?=\w+[[:punct:]]+$)
In an earlier course the author described the + (one or more) modifier as unusable in a lookbehind or lookahead i.e. (?<=.+). What's the difference here?
A: The limitation mentioned in an earlier movie referred only to positive lookbehind and negative lookbehind. I was able to use the one or more times (+) metacharacter in the positive lookahead portion of the expression because that limitation doesn't affect either positive or negative lookahead. It's only when looking backward that GREP ignores the repeat metacharacters.
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Introduction
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Welcome1m 4s
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1. GREP Basics
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What is GREP?1m 53s
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2. Basic Metacharacters
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Escaping out metacharacters2m 49s
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Building with wild cards9m 9s
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Specifying locations7m 4s
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3. Advanced Metacharacters
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Creating "or" conditions5m 24s
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Building subexpressions5m 52s
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4. GREP Styles
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Describing inconsistent text6m 59s
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5. GREP Find/Change
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Understanding queries8m 20s
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Cleaning up text with GREP2m 45s
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6. A Practical Project with Advanced Find/Change and GREP
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Conclusion
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Goodbye27s
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Video: Backreferences in search queries