Grep - How to find non-italics characters followed by italics

I found a way,
Find: (?<!.)[:,;")!?%]|["(](?!.)

Find format: font style regular (or if you work with characterstyles, like I do chacacter style: [none])

 Change format: italic (or character-style: italic)

Explanation: It looks for every character in the list [:,;")!?%] that is preceded by any character that is not regular/has no character style OR every character in the second list ["(] that is followed by a character that is not regular/has no character style.

It's not perfect. I would like to optimize it so that it won't find brackets in which the text is not fully italic (e.g this text). But I couldn't find out how. It does work well enough though.

This is not something you can just like that with InDesign's Grep. The Grep manager that Gert mentioned can't do that, don't know about Automatication's solution. If Michael's solution doesn't work for you, you can change italic formatting to text tags, so that this:

Review of Religions,

(where the comma is not italic) is rendered like this:

<i>Review of Religions</i>,

You can then search for (</i>)([[:punct:]]) and replace with $2$1 to move the punctuation inside the italics. Then you change the italic tags back to italic formatting. This method is described in detail in https://indesignsecrets.com/issues/issue-76-publish-anywhere. You'd do that again for bold and bold-italic. You can store the queries and rerun them. It's a method I've been using a lot, and it works well.

Peter

I would run this 3 times:

Find What: (\,|\;|\:)

Find Format: Regular

Change To: leave blank

Change Format: Character Style Italic

The second time you run it I would reset to Bold Character Style.

The third time I would run it I would reset to Bold Italic Character Style.

Automatic? No. But it would allow you to inspect each occurrence, and it would only take 5 minutes.