GREP search: change style within parentheses

Question

I have a document that includes long lists of names, many of which are followed by words in parentheses that need to have a certain character style applied (but the parentheses remain unstyled). Several years ago I asked if there is a GREP search that can accomplish this, and I received an answer from Nigel Chapman that worked:

Because you want to exclude the brackets from the matched string, you need to use look-behind and look-ahead. It isn't pretty. Search for

(?<=$)[^)]+(?=$)

Set the replacement to

$0

and set the Change Format to your character style.

It doesn't seem to be working now. Should this still accomplish what I need, or is there a change to the Find or Change To strings I need to make?

Mac OS 12.4

InDesign 17.3

Thanks

Peter Kahrel · Accepted Answer

As Brian mentioned the $) isn't necessary. But why your expression doesn't work isn't clear, it works fine over here (with or without the escape that Brian mentioned).

But the expression uses two ways to stop at the first closing parenthesis, one is good enough. You can use either of these two:

(?<=\()[^)]+

(?<=\().+?(?=\))

In the first one, [^)]+ stands for 'while not )', and in the second one, .+?(?=\)) stands for 'repeat until the first next )'.

P.

brian_p_dts · Answer

You don't need the $0. You can leave the ChangeTo field blank. But this code with an extra escape in the negative expression line works [^\)]. Can you provide a sample line where that doesn't work?

Find:

(?<=\()[^\)]+(?=\))

Change Format: Your character style

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