Join Michael Murphy for an in-depth discussion in this video Learning the undocumented location metacharacters, part of Learning GREP with InDesign.
There are a few location metacharacters that are not listed in the Help files or…available from the Special Characters menu.…One of them is quite obscure, but two of them are very useful and those are the…Beginning of Story and End of Story metacharacters.…As you know, InDesign considers any series of threaded text frames as one story.…So, while text may span many frames across many pages, if it's linked up it's…considered one story and you may need to find the beginning of a story or…describe the end of the story for a specific purpose in Find/Change.…
Let's take a look at how that works.…I'll hit Command+F, or Ctrl+F on Windows to open the Find/Change dialog and make…sure that I am in GREP mode.…In the Find what field, to describe the beginning of a story, I'll type…\A. That's the metacharacter for Beginning of Story, and I'll click Find.…And my cursor is moved to the position at the beginning of this story.…I'll go back and click Find Next, and my cursor gets moved to the beginning of…the next story, in this next chapter.…
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: Learning the undocumented location metacharacters