Grep Styles for an Entire Paragraph

[kasiariele]

Hello all,

I'm very new to the GREP Styles (just discovered it yesterday) and I'm wondering if there's a GREP Style to be able to detect a certain word in a paragraph and change the color of the entire paragraph based on that word?

Background: I'm working on a card project that has color-coded text based on the subject matter and there's a total of about 48 cards ranging with 8 different subject matters. I'm just trying to see if there's a way to color code these paragraphs on each card without needing to manually do it.

In this case, I want the entire paragraph 'We're investing...communities' to be the tinted orange.

I'm hoping there's a better solution (or script!) than me manually selecting the text on all these cards vs me just selecting keywords.

[Barb Binder]

Hi Kburns:

I'm still learning GREP so perhaps someone else has a more elegant solution but this works:

.+safe.+

~Barb

[Frans v.d. Geest]

Ah, Barb, also a nice one 😉

[vinny38]

Ah well...

Grep is magic alright, but mind the spell while casting...

Otherwise, you could turn all Frenchmen into Love symbols while trying to turn frogs into Princes

[Barb Binder]

Hi Vinny:

I can see your point. In the spirit of continuing my GREP education, how would you write this differently, given the one example from the OP?

~Barb

[vinny38]

Sure Barb!

First I would add (?i) to make the regex case insensitive.

Then I would wrap the keyword with \b word-boundaries. Although it would probably be cool to catch "safety" too, it probably wouldn't be so cool to catch "unsafe".

Finally, I would change "one or more" by "zero or more" in order to handle cases where the keyword starts or ends the paragraph.

This leads us to:

(?i).*\bsafe\b.*

Now, I also could have missed something... That's the beauty of Grep. So powerful, but so picky...

[Jongware · Accepted solution]

That would be something like:

(?i).*\b(safe)\b.*

where

(?i) switches GREP to Case Insensitive mode

.* (instead of .+) so there may be zero or more characters before the word in question

\b <word> \b forces word breaks before and after -- i.e., this is one "entire word"

( <word> ) -- parenthesis around the word to look for -- is so you can use a single GREP for multiple words, using the OR | bar to separate them (like|this)

.. and after that, a word break to end the word and zero or more any-characters all the way up to the end.

Ha, I see Vinny indeed came up with this exact same expression!

[kasiariele]

Thank you [Jongware]​!! This was the perfect solution. I definitely spent 3+ hours last night trying to figure it out, and I definitely wouldn't have come up with this looking at the presets in Indesign.

[Frans v.d. Geest]

Create  Paragraph Styles, search for a word and in Replace choose the correct Paragraph style.

[Barb Binder]

Hi Kburns​:

Please give Vinny's expression a try and let us know if it works for you. If so, one of us can mark it as the correct answer.

~Barb

[kasiariele]

Thanks all! I will try them both and see what works best. Now I'm realizing there might be multiple words for some paragraphs I need to callout so would I just use (?i).*\b(safe) | (communities)\b.* or maybe .+safe | communities.+ ?

[vinny38]

(?i).*\b(safe|communities)\b.*

as per Jongware good advice