How to find next/find previous with select text

@ai8153

Are you looking for a free / one time solution - or paid?

My tool will let you search in the current Story, Tables, InLine / Anchored Objects from the current InsertionPoint till the end of the Document - or in the specified range of pages. You could also limit the scope to the area or Layer(s).

But it's not free - and it's PC only. 

@ai8153 said: "It can only find the nearest one, but it cannot search continuously."

Hi @ai8153 ,

I thought from your code in your inital post, that you want to find the first instance only…

And I did not think about the case that your cursor could be positioned in a table text cell when you start the script.

Let's see into some cases:

[ 1 ] You want to find text in a table where the table special character is part of the story. Nothing's wrong with that. But that case needs a different approach and more code.

[ 2 ] Do you also regard anchored text frames as part of the story where you want to find text?

What about text frames in groups that are anchored to the story?

What about more complex cases with nested objects of any kind that can contain text frames?

[ 3 ] How about footnote texts? Do you regard footnote texts also as part of a story where you want to find text?

My thinking about all this revolves around the idea of selected text frames as scope of app.selection[0].findGrep() and not of text. And methods to determine if a found instance comes before or after an insertion point that is currently selected…

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Expert )

Hi @ai8153 , Do you want to restore your starting selection? There‘s also this which gets the text from the cursor to the end of the story and uses that for the search:

var sel = app.activeDocument.selection
if (sel.length>0) {
	if (sel[0].hasOwnProperty("parentStory")) {
        var myFound = []
        var ps = sel[0].parentStory;
        var si = sel[0].insertionPoints[-1]
        var ei = ps.texts[0].insertionPoints[-2];
        //gets the text from the start of the selection to the end of the story
        var tr = ps.insertionPoints.itemByRange(si,ei).texts[0]
        app.findGrepPreferences = app.changeGrepPreferences = app.findChangeGrepOptions = null;
        app.findGrepPreferences.findWhat = "\\[|\\]";
        myFound = tr.findGrep()[0];
        if (myFound.length>0) {
            myFound[0].select();
        } 
    } else {alert("No Text Selected")}
} else {alert("No Text Selected")}

Hi @ai8153 ,

With the cursor just set or with a selected range of characters, you could expand the text selection to the end of the story first and then do findGrep() on the selection, the selected text. To expand the text selection:

app.select
( 
	app.selection[0].parentStory.texts[0].insertionPoints.itemByRange
	( 
		app.selection[0].insertionPoints[0] , 
		app.selection[0].parentStory.insertionPoints[-1]
	) 
);

All in all this:

app.findGrepPreferences = null;
app.findChangeGrepOptions.searchBackwards = false;

app.findGrepPreferences.findWhat = "\\[|\\]";

var originalSelection = app.selection[0];

// Select text from the current insertion point to the end of the story:
app.select
( 
	app.selection[0].parentStory.texts[0].insertionPoints.itemByRange
	( 
		app.selection[0].insertionPoints[0] , 
		app.selection[0].parentStory.insertionPoints[-1]
	) 
);

// Run findGrep() on the selection:
var myFound = app.selection[0].findGrep();

// Select the first instance found:
if( myFound.length > 0 )
{
	app.select( myFound[0] );
}else
{ 
	// Restore your original selection:
	app.select( originalSelection ) 
};

That would also find text in a table that is inserted after the current position of your cursor.

Note: The scope for findGrep(), the text selection, will not see into anchored text frames.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Expert )

So you're looking for [ and ], then want to do something to text bracketed by [ and ]

You should probably look for "\\[.*?\\]" to capture those bracketed texts. Is there any reason why you don't do that?

> I want to find and select the result from cursor point in Indesign.

from the cursor point to where? The end of the story?

You need to select text from cursor to end of the Story and then run search on the selection - not the app.

If you want to search from current page to the end of the Document - it's a bit more complicated.