Exclude certain characters from posix [[:punct:]] search

Use negative lookahead

(?![\x{0027}\x{0028}])[[:punct:]]

Negative lookahead is successful if can not match to the right, so in this case is successful if the character on the right is not apostrophe or left parenthesis. Then search for punctuation.

Search any word character followed by punctuation, except ' or (:

(\w)((?![\x{0027}\x{0028}])([[:punct:]]))

Change:

$1 $2

Hi @defaultu0e43kqloi6n, well here's a straightforward (warning: probably naive!) approach:

([!%&*+,-.:;?)}\]])(\S)

Edit: I removed some unnecessary escaping inside the [ ], thanks to @FRIdNGE's help.

These are the characters that would seem to me to be the problems in ordinary latin text. Because I excluded apostrophe, it won't pick up trailing single quotes with no space. eg. this won't be caught: ‘The quick brown fox’The next sentence.

Be careful when copy/pasting the grep string above—Indesign or your OS can remove escape characters sometimes.

ChangeTo:

$1 $2

To add a space between the punctuation and the non-space character.

If you want to change the list of punctuation, just add or remove from between the first [ and the last ].

- Mark