Another grep request, much appreciated

[Beemo8bit]

Hello all.

I can find grep commands that do some of these things, but I need one that does all of them. For some wild reason, after spending hours online, I cannot find the solution. I appreciate your help. No, nested styles do not help here. I need a command in my paragraph style that does this:

- applies a character style up to AND INCLUDING a colon, ONLY if there's a colon in the paragraph.

- Ideally this goes up to just the first colon. If that's not possible, I need to set a word limit (let's say 10 words for example) on how far the search goes into the paragraph.

Thank you.

[m1b]

Hi @Beemo8bit, add a Grep style with this pattern:

^[^:]+:

It means: 

^        match start of text

[^:]+  match one or more characters that aren't colon

:         match one colon

[FRIdNGE]

^.+?:

(^/) The Jedi

[Beemo8bit]

Thanks, but this doesn't have the word limit option that I really need too.

[FRIdNGE · Accepted solution]

Words Limit = 10! So:

^(\H+\h){0,9}?\H+:

Words Limit = 4! So:

^(\H+\h){0,3}?\H+:

(^/)

[Beemo8bit]

You have saved my sanity!!!!!

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

Couldn't nested styles do this too?

[Peter Spier]

Couldn't nested styles do this too?

By @Dave Creamer of IDEAS

I think the requirement for no match if there's no colon rules out a nested style as it would end up matching the entire paragraph.

[Beemo8bit]

Correct, I tried this already. If Adobe could add a nested style option for 'after' as well as 'before' or 'through', that would be a game changer! A feature I see that requested many years ago already....

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

Ah, missed that part...