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

[Jens Draser-Schieb]

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...), 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)|/

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

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. 

[Jens Draser-Schieb]

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 /).

[Jens Draser-Schieb]

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.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Do the texts you want to "fix" have multiple ParaStyles applied - or just one - like "body" and "[None]" CharStyle? 

Because you could narrow your search by first applying dedicated CharStyle to Hyperlinks - then use Char & ParaStyle combo for your fix.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Or... You can do as I've suggested earlier, with a slight modification:

1) style Hyperlinks with dedicated CharStyle, 

2) do your fix on everything, 

3) remove spaces with CharStyle from 1) applied.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

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"? 

[Jens Draser-Schieb]

This is a great idea! I’ll use this for now, as this will exclude most URLs (some like e.g.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture indeed use upper case letters).

Also, there is a small chance that this might exclude edge cases, which are not URLs, but in which names have to be written a certain way, e.g. BRAND/brand or Brand©/“Brand”, but I’d be willing to take the risk. Thank you!

I have considered solutions involving character and paragraph styles before, however, I’d also like to understand InDesign’s GREP sytax a litte better, which is why I’m aiming for a GREP-only solution, if possible.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

I've updated my last reply a bit. 

You could also include "space" and "punctuations", etc. before / after - as they are not allowed in the Web addresses.

[Jens Draser-Schieb]

Not sure I can follow.

The lookbehind/lookahead is needed, so only the / would be found, which is why (\u\l+)(\/)(\u\l+) would not work.

Using \w in the lookbehind/lookahead would include URLs, again, as well.

So far, (?<=\l)(\/)(?=\u) is a great solution, however, a few edge cases I found are

• URLs with uppercase letters, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
  
• Names with abbriviations, e.g. Salinger, J. D./Steinbeck, John or name prefixes, e.g. Roosevelt, Isaac Daniel/van Rosenvelt, Claes Maartenszen

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

You are right, then:

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

will find Word/Word so your example URL will be ignored. 

Not sure if you can use "exclude" in lookbehind / ahead - but [-\/] placed before / after should limit found results to single "/" between two Words? 

Or "?" placed correctly should make GREP not greedy. But it would require adding spaces, puncts, etc. to the mix. 

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Can you share your file - on priv of course - for some testing?