Find a word at the beginning of the line?

[Yala K. Al-Douri]

Hi all,

Is it possibe to find a word, ONLY if it is at the beginning of the line?

Best Regards

[platm72]

Hi,

open find window (command/control F), select GREP tab and type:

^yourWord

^ – means shift 6 

regards M.

[Yala K. Al-Douri]

Thank you platm72.

Your solution is correct for (Beginning of Paragraph).

The question is about (Beginning of a line).

Regards

[Jongware]

Not in the user interface itself. The only GREP codes for "beginning of ..." are \A for Beginning of Story and "^" for Beginning of Paragraph and "\<" for Beginning of Word – see also the Online Help at https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/find-change.html#metacharacters_for_searching (actually that list is far from complete as "Beginning of Story" is missing; but there is no hidden "Beginning of Line" code).

It can be scripted, but for a script tailored for your needs we need more information. This quick short one, for example, will search only the first occurrence of a word from the start of a selected story, and I am pretty sure you want more than that.

findText = prompt ("Find", "");
if (findText)
{
	app.findGrepPreferences.findWhat = '\\<'+findText+'\\>';
	list = app.selection[0].parentStory.findGrep ();
	while (list.length)
	{
		item = list.shift();
		if (item.characters[0] == item.lines[0].characters[0])
		{
			item.select();
			exit();
		}
	}
	alert ("Not found");
}

 as it will only find the first occurrence of the input word/words at the beginning of a line:

[Yala K. Al-Douri]

Thank you Jongware very much for your details, which showed me that this feature does not exist in InDesign itself.

Your (pretty sure) is (pretty correct). I am looking for a similar of (Find/Change) feature.

Best Regards.

[S.J.G._T.]

Dear Jongware,
I just saw your answer to the "Find a word at the beginning of the line?" problem.
I have the same problem - in Tibetan, the character ། can never be at the beginning of a line (it is kind of comma, period or semicolon) - Tibetan uses hardly any spaces and never one before that character, so non-breaking spaces are not an option.
I tried your script, but could not get it to work (at all somehow). Is there a way to make it generally work to find all instances of a character at the beginning of any line?
Thank you, with kind regards S.J.G.

[SJRiegel]

I can't test this, since I don't have a Tibetan font, but you could try a GREP style that applies a No Break Character Style to   .།

This should force the ། character to stay with whatever character comes before it.

[S.J.G._T.]

(a some what quite late) Thank you very much. That works very well. (Have to type the Tibetan into the GREP style creation box, just marking and creating a new GREP style does not quite work with Tibetan.)