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J
Jens Draser-Schieb
Participant
August 24, 2024
Question

How to limit GREP search to words which do not start with certain characters?

  • August 24, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 687 views

In InDesign, I’m using the GREP expression (?<=.)/(?=.) to locate all occurrences of the slash character / throughout a document. For example, I want to find the character / in Color/Colour or American English/British English in order to apply a certain styling to the slash.

 

As a next step, I want to limit this to all words/strings that do not begin with either https, https or www, so the slashes in https://usa.gov/about or www.gov.uk/about should not be included in the results. Lone slashes should be ignored. How can this be achieved?

 

I have managed to find all words/strings that begin with either http or www with \<www|\<http, however, I’m not able to combine the two.

 

I’ve tried the following, based on an answer to my question on Stack Overflow (https://stackoverflow.com/a/78494627/3103254), which should work with the boost regex engine InDesign GREP is using (https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/grep-what-is-the-base-syntax-of-indesign-grep/td-p/10321905), however, while this works fine in a testing environment (https://regex101.com/r/a0x0zG/1), this does not seem to work in InDesign: (?<!\S)(?:(?:https?|www)\S+|/+(?!\S))(*SKIP)(*F)|/

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1 reply

Robert at ID-Tasker
Robert at ID-Tasker
Legend
August 24, 2024

What do you want to do with found text? 

 

Are you changing its contents - by adding / removing characters - or you just want to change formatting / appearance?

 

InDesign uses its own implementation of RegExp. 

 

 

Would be extremely easy to achieve with my tool - first, find everything with "/" then filter out web addresses or limit even more, then do whatever you want to do with what's left - but you are probably looking for a free solution / it's a one-off / you work on a Mac? 

 

 

If it's just styling / formatting - why not do it in two steps: 

1) apply whatever styling / formatting you want to all texts meeting your criteria, 

2) "reset" all web links. 

 

J
Jens Draser-SchiebAuthor
Participant
August 25, 2024

Thank you, Robert.

 

Yes, I would love to achive this / learn how to achieve this with InDesign GREP without third-party tools. And yes, I’m working on a Mac.

 

The goal is not to apply styling, but to run a search replace through multiple documents that allows me to

  1. either skip a search result, e.g. if the / is found in Berlin/London, i.e. Word/Word
  2. or replace result, e.g. if the / is found in Mexico City/New York, i.e. Multiple Words/Multiple Words (as in German this should be Mexico City / New York, i.e. with a space on both sides of the /).
Robert at ID-Tasker
Robert at ID-Tasker
Legend
August 25, 2024

To clarify the context: in the documents there are many instances of URLs starting with https, http or www, which do contain a lot of /, e.g. https://example.org/path/to/subpage In order to cut down the time on the search replace, mentioned above, I’d like to exclude these URLs from the search.


Or you could use the fact, that you are looking for

 

(lowercase)(/)(Uppercase).

 

so probably something like this - if that's the correct syntax for pos/neg look:

 

(?<=\l)(\/)(?=\u)

 

To:

 

[space]$2[space]

 

Or just:

 

[space]/[space] 

 

Of course change "[space]" to actual space.

 

Web addresses should be lowercase anyway. 

 

 

Or you could search for:

 

(\u\l+)(\/)(\u\l+)

 

to be more precise. 

 

Or maybe even use "\w"? 

 

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