GREP exclusion question

[Daniel308]

Hi everyone.

I've been reading all kinds of posts and trying different things as per suggestions but I'm still a bit stumped.

I have a large document and need to go through searching for him, his, he and change to his/hers etc. I am using the expression

\bhe\b|\bhis\b|\bhim\b to find the whole words I need which works fine. But once I've changed "him" for example to "him/her" the same instance of remains in the results when I hit 'NEXT'. So every time I make a correction, it starts me back at the first instance I've corrected. 

What I would like to do is to exclude any instances of previous corrections in the search. So I want to find "his" but not "his/hers". Seems simple enough, but I'm still struggling with how to employ [ ] or ( ) to achieve this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[vladan saveljic]

maybe I didn't understand very well which text exactly you try to find and replace,

but try this grep and let us know

find

\bhe\b|\bhis\b(?!/hers)(?!/her)|\bhim\b(?!/hers)(?!/her)

replace:

his/hers

[Jongware]

Vladan, you are spot on but a note on your lookaheads: you don't need both "/her" and "/hers" as the first will also match the second. Perhaps you meant an exact word match "/her\b" and "/hers\b", as you used for the first word.

(The advantage of having exact matches only is that it won't work on unexpected variants and accidental typos.)

[Daniel308]

Thanks to you both. So I'm now using this: \bhe\b|\bhis\b|\bhim\b(?!/hers)(?!/she)(?!/hers)(?!/her)

but it is still finding previously corrected "his/her", "he/she" entries.

To be extra clear, this is an example of the text I'm starting with:

"...many procedures and regulations which a pilot must know and which he must follow..."

" Terrain and collision avoidance are his responsibility."

I do a search for  \bhe\b|\bhis\b|\bhim\b and correct to:

"...many procedures and regulations which a pilot must know and which he/she must follow..."

" Terrain and collision avoidance are his/her responsibility."

However even with the GREP code \bhe\b|\bhis\b|\bhim\b(?!/hers)(?!/she)(?!/hers)(?!/her) it is still finding "he" in previously corrected "he/she" instances which is a huge problem because of the massive size of the document I'm working on. On some pages there are six or more instances that need to be corrected in a 200+ page text.

Am I doing something wrong or missed a detail somewhere.

thanks again everyone.

[vladan saveljic]

1) if you wanto to change: he to he/she you can use this grep

find:

\bhe\b(?!/she)

change to:

he/she

2) if you wanto to change: his to his/her you can use this grep

find:

\bhis\b(?!/her)

change to:

his/her

[Peter Kahrel]

Daniel -- What you describe is not related to the form of the GREP expression, but to InDesign's behaviour. To get around that, use 'To end of story' as the search scope.