GREP Style to remove a character symbol

[courtney klecka]

How would I remove a character symbol within a set of words?  The example below has "~" that needs to be removed from the description.

Huggable Suit Hangers~ Black Pkg/10

Thanks in advance

[Barb Binder]

A GREP style can be used to assign formatting to a pattern, but not to remove anything.

Do you need to simply remove every ~ from the document? You can do that with a Text find/change. (Leave Change to blank.)

Or is there a pattern involved to isolate just specific ~'s? In that case, a GREP find/change might be the answer. We'll need more information about how/where the ~'s appear to help you with that.

[courtney klecka]

I should've added some additional detail.  I typically use find/change as you detailed above, but I thought there could be a way to have it be automatically removed through a GREP style/expression somehow.  There are other character symbols that can be in descriptions that I copy from a spreadsheet so I'm doing several clicks through the find/change to remove them all.

[Barb Binder]

In that situation, a regular text find/change is what you want, as Aman and I both described above.

But, did you know you can save your queries (top row of my screen shot) to make this quicker--then just select them from the list In the future? And you can buy a plug-in that can string them together for you to save even more time!

http://www.automatication.com/index.php?id=24

[courtney klecka]

I didn't know that the queries could be saved.  That's fantastic.  I'll be sure to check out the plug-in, too.  Thanks for the tips!

[DBLjan]

Heyya.

If you dont want to alter your source-text, you can also "hide" these characters, by GREP:

As you see, the paragraph above is generic with 3 tildes, the second has a paragraphstyle, which finds the tilde by GREP and uses the character-style HIDE (which has just textcolor set to none/none) and HIDE2 (which does use "Unterschneidung" -500-ish to pull the space together).

[loiss34854827]

This was so incedibly helpful! Thank you!

[Jan373823687ed1]

You can even simplyfy this and using just one grep and characterstyle: Just apply no color and 1% horizontal scaling on the character you want to hide. This 1% makes the char nearly invisible.

[amaarora · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Use Find/change?

Find=~

Change=(nothing)

-Aman

[courtney klecka]

Thanks!  I've been doing find change, but thought there was something that I could do to eliminate the extra clicks since I have other character symbols that need to be removed as well.

[Mátt]

Hi,

This can be accomplished by setting up a Character style that reduces the point size of the text to 0.1 and changes the color to the same color of the background.

The character style setup I used is below:

Then I applied this to my paragraph style as a GREP style to remove all brackets when close together with a space after them in text. E.g. "Text text text () text text text (text)"

It would remove the "() " and leave the text as below:

"Text text text text text text (text)"

The grep setup was as follows:

And the example in the actual text with no style attached:

With the style attached:

Below is the GREP i used for your example using the same Character style detailed above:

The reason for the extra \ is to remove the space after this character if one exists.

So a GREP to remove both "~ " with a space and to remove "~" without a space after would be:

Hope this helps.

Thanks