Inspiring

Question

Catching an apostrophe with GREP - help required please

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
January 10, 2025
2 replies
737 views

Hi there,

I'm trying to catch words like we'll and you'll using GREP but as yet haven't succeeded.

So far I have this...

(?i)\b(we’ll|you’ll)\b

This gets me pretty close but doesn't catch the whole word including the 'll.

Please can someone point me in the right direction.

Thanks

Peter Spier

Community Expert

Works fine here in CS6, haven't tried newer versions.

Do you need to find specifally thoise two words, or are you looking fore a more general case of any word with apostrophe followed by two letters?

Peter Spier

Community Expert

Here's a general case:

[\u\l]+['~']\l{2}\b

It finds all the wods with apostrophes in this sentence: It’ll be awhile before we’ve finished and then you’ll see the result and we’ll get together when you're satisfied.

deckardukAuthor

Inspiring

Thanks for the help Peter, I'll run some tests 🙂

m1b

Community Expert

Here's one way:

\b(we|you)['’]ll\b

The square brackets match either typographical apostrophe or normal.

Edit: wait! I just tried your exact grep and it works as expected. How do you mean it doesn't catch the 'll?

N

Nick37129562ryen

Known Participant

Thanks for the help, works perfectly.

I added in the case-insensitive modifier too which takes it one step further.

Is there a way to modify the epression to include the words we and you too?

Can that all be done in one?

Thanks

m1b

Community Expert

To catch the words you and we also? Something like this:

(?i)\b(we|you)(['’]ll)?\b

I've put the apostrophe ell ell into a capture group to match zero or one instances. So it will match we and you whether there is ’ll or not.

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