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LinSims
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LinSimsCommunity Expert
Community Expert
March 22, 2021
Answered

Missing Blog Post: Regular Expressions

  • March 22, 2021
  • 7 replies
  • 660 views

A number of years ago a very useful Adobe Blog post was made describing how to write regular expressions for FrameMaker's Find & Replace function.

 

I wanted to read that Friday because I wanted to try my hand at writing an expression, and it's gone. Any chance of its contents being made available again?

 

This was the URL: https://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/2016/03/framemaker-regular-expressions.html

 

That link now automatically redirects to the Adobe Blog TechComm page. I've scrolled back to entries from 2014, and this one isn't there.

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      7 replies

      LinSims
      Community Expert
      LinSimsCommunity ExpertAuthor
      Community Expert
      March 22, 2021

      You know what's really odd? The blog posts immediately before and after the one covering regex are still available on the TechComm blog.

      K.Daube
      Community Expert
      K.DaubeCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      March 23, 2021

      «The blog posts immediately before and after the one covering regex are still available on the TechComm blog» Yes, after about 8 "show more ..." I got the same result.

      Unfortuantely not all what is written there, holds its promises:

      \s (white space) does not find: n-space, m-space, required space, numeric space and TAB. It only finds ordinary blanks, hard and soft line break. The reason might be, that the not-found items are not characters, but FM-functions… I have not yet tested out everything, in particular not the Unicode character ranges.

      Nevertheless the post is very beneficial as it goes far beyond what is available in Help and which I had to find out by experiments for my project FMfindRepl.

       

       

        LinSims
        Community Expert
        LinSimsCommunity ExpertAuthor
        Community Expert
        March 23, 2021

        Well, it is 7 years old. I'm sure a few things have changed in the intervening years.

         

        But I'm glad I'm not the only one @Jeff_Coatsworth helped by finding the article. 

         

        Meantime, according to the FM help file:

         

         

         

        By default, you use the Perl regular expression syntax to write regular expressions in FrameMaker. However, to use either the Grep or Egrep regular expression syntax, you need to update the Regular Expression Syntax flag in the maker.ini.

         

         

         

        And according to the Perl site, you can use "\t" (I think not including the quote marks) for tabs and you can also use Unicode codes to find oddball characters.

         

        Here's the direct link to the Perl regex site as given by the FM help file. 

        https://perldoc.perl.org/perlre#Regular-Expressions

         

        (I post the direct link here because if you click it in the Help file, the bloody thing opens in IE no matter what your default browser is set to. And then Microsoft nags to get you to switch to Edge.)

          LinSims
          Community Expert
          LinSimsCommunity ExpertAuthor
          Community Expert
          March 22, 2021

          @Jeff_Coatsworth Dude. Many props.

          Barb Binder
          Community Expert
          Barb BinderCommunity Expert
          Community Expert
          March 22, 2021

          @Jeff_Coatsworth 

           

          You are so clever! ☺️

           

          ~Barb 

          ~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training
          Jeff_Coatsworth
          Community Expert
          Jeff_CoatsworthCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
          Community Expert
          March 22, 2021

          The Wayback Machine reveals all 😁 - see https://web.archive.org/web/20160505180616/https://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/2016/03/framemaker-regular-expressions.html 

            Barb Binder
            Community Expert
            Barb BinderCommunity Expert
            Community Expert
            March 22, 2021

            Yes, you could have used regex for that situation and yes, it is very helpful for fixing anything that matches a regular pattern. Regex doesn't get much attention in FrameMaker or on the forums—it's the opposite of InDesign—but I find it invaluable for cleaning up and standardizing my documents. 

             

            ~Barb 

            ~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training
              LinSims
              Community Expert
              LinSimsCommunity ExpertAuthor
              Community Expert
              March 22, 2021

              I appreciate the offer, but it was a short document so I brute-forced it. I was looking for a comma followed by a space followed by a capital letter (varying value) followed by a closed parenthesis, and I wanted to replace the space with a hard space. Regex would have allowed me to do a replace all instead of deciding for each individually but, as I said, short document. 🙂

               

              All good now, but I recall that blog post being very informative about using regex in FM and I wish it weren't gone. I've been thinking that learning to use regex would be very, very useful, especially in situations like that.

              Barb Binder
              Community Expert
              Barb BinderCommunity Expert
              Community Expert
              March 22, 2021

              Depending on the complexity, perhaps I can help you work it out, Lin.

               

              I use on our fellow ACP Peter Kahrel's book—https://www.amazon.com/GREP-InDesign-InDesignSecrets-Peter-Kahrel/dp/0982508387. It is written for InDesign, but regular expressions are regular expressions. 

               

              ~Barb 

              ~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training
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