Join Michael Murphy for an in-depth discussion in this video Describing and standardizing phone numbers, part of Learning GREP with InDesign.
I'm working in a file of directory listings, and I've noticed a problem.…I have several hundred phone numbers in here and they're not all…styled consistently.…Some of them use dots between the numbers, some have no space at all, some use a…1 before the area code, some have that area code enclosed in parentheses.…This could be a very tedious problem for either me or an editor, or it could be…dealt with very quickly and accurately using GREP and Find/Change.…Since I'm dealing with phone numbers, there are some rules that apply.…
A US phone number consists of a three- digit area code, a three-digit exchange…and four numbers after that.…That's a structure that all of the phone numbers will definitely have, regardless…of whether they start with 1 or not, use dashes, use periods, do or don't have…spaces, or use parentheses.…So let's start with the structure of a phone number, and how we can define that,…and then deal with the parts that don't match up.…I'm going to open up the Find/Change dialog using Command+F on the Mac, or Ctrl+F…
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 19s
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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: Describing and standardizing phone numbers