Join Michael Murphy for an in-depth discussion in this video Using character sets to create custom wild cards, part of Learning GREP with InDesign.
The Wildcard Metacharacters we saw in a previous movie, like any digit,…any character, and so on, provide a quick convenient way to describe…common character types.…But you may find yourself wanting to define your own custom wildcards of…specific characters to be matched.…That's what the next option under the Match sub-menu, Character Sets, allows you to do.…I'm zoomed in on the top part of Page 3 in this document, and my cursor is…inside of the body text, which is why you see it highlighted here in the…Paragraph Styles panel, where I'll right-click it, choose Edit Body Text and go…to the GREP Style area.…
I am going to create a New GREP Style to demonstrate how character sets work.…From the Apply Style menu, I am going to choose the existing Red character style.…That will just color the text red on the page and the default of any digit one…or more times is in here.…Again, if I just click in there, you'll see that it highlights any digit on the page.…That's actually a useful starting off point because any digit means any digit, 0 through 9.…
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: Using character sets to create custom wild cards