Multiple GREP assistance with postivie look ahead in para styles

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
February 2, 2024
3 replies
518 views

I'm trying to match the following in a couple of grep styles in the same, single paragraph style:

Format:

Artist Songname (date)

Lots more text that needs to be unstyled like the date above.

text + endash + text (date)

text

Example:

Bob Dylan I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Have Never Met) (1964)

I can't understand
She let go of my hand
And left me here facing the wall

I'm trying to style the 'singer' name with this (seems to be working fine):

(?s).*~>

and the song title with this (but I don't think it's right):

(?s)(?<=~>).*(?<=\()

How do I capture the song title, which could contain parentheses, but not the parenthesised date?

I also keep accidentally capturing the opening parenthesis of the date in my positive look ahead.

I was thinking along the lines of a positive lookahead that includes \([0-9]{,4}\) but it doesn't seem to work.

Any and all help appreciated!

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Peter Spier

Community Expert

I am not a GREP Expert so I look for things that make finding the breaks easier, and because names and song titles can vary in word and character counts, I think you will have trouble with GREP searches that try to identify them using spaces.

An alternative would be to add some sort of tag you can add to separate the parts of the paragraph, and InDesign actually has a built-in tag that should work perfectly here: End Nested Style.

It has no width and is invisible so it won't affect your text flow, and it does not require the use of GREP at all, just ordinary nested styles in your paragraph style definition.

I don't know how you are getting the text into InDesign, but if you are using Data Merge you can modify your template to include the tags.

This won't be much help, unfortunately, if you are trying to style an existing text since automating the insertion of the tags is essentially the same problem as doing the styling.