By itself GREP is a very powerful feature, but its integration into InDesign…adds even more options that you wouldn't get with GREP in a plain text editor,…specifically, the ability to use nearly all of InDesign's text formatting and…style attributes as additional search and replace criteria.…In this file, I've got a listing of physicians, including a short bio about each one.…I am part way through this project and let's assume there are hundreds of these…in here, and they're all set up, and I'm told that in the headers above the bio…every physician's name must have M.D. appended to the end of it.…
This is a very tedious task. I don't want to go in line-by-line and have to do myself.…What I need to do is get that M.D. added to the end of a line only in the…headers, not in the bios or in any other part of this document where I don't want it.…GREP can help me define the end of the line, but only InDesign can help me…define the end of a line that uses a specific style.…Here's how I'd solve this problem.…
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 formatting and styles as Find/Change criteria