Issue with "Find and Change All" Function in InDesign Affecting Text Formatting

Question

Hi Team,I'm encountering an issue with InDesign's Find and Change All functionality that impacts text formatting.Scenario:I need to search for a specific pattern and apply replacements across the entire document. When I perform the replacements one by one, everything works perfectly, and the original formatting (such as bold and italics) is preserved. However, when I use Change All, it breaks the formatting and causes styled text to lose its appearance.Even in a simple scenario—where we are not modifying the content but just replacing the matched string with itself—the formatting still gets affected. Example:Find What: ([^~a
]+)Change To: $0Before: After: Looking forward to your suggestions or a possible workaround to retain the formatting while using the Change All function. Thanks in Advance,Muthu Veerappan

Joel Cherney · Accepted Answer

I've found all manner of weirdness when including the anchor marker in the "Change" field. Does your query work as expected when you run it without the ~a?

When working on a project with thousands of anchors and a find/change query list hundreds of items long, I found that the safest way to actually use "Change To" was to only specify ~a in lookaheads and lookbehinds.

Robert at ID-Tasker · Answer

So you're looking for at least one Anchored marker OR end of paragraph OR manual line break - at the beginning of the paragraph?

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