How to use GREP to exclude certain words, sentences, characters and numbers?

[CRen1995]

Hi all.

I've only recently started using InDesign for a company I'm working for and they use it to produce a wrestling almanac. One thing they do is highlight all the wrestler's names on a card in bold so a card may look something like this:

MONDAY NIGHT RAW
22-01-01, Lafayette, Louisiana WWF
Test defeated William Regal to win the WWF European Title in 1:29; The Acolytes (Faarooq and Bradshaw) defeated The Hardy Boyz (Matt Hardy and Jeff Hardy) in 5:03;

Currently I'm going through and using a character style to bold all the names and tag team names but there are quite a few to get through so it will take some time to do all of that and it leaves the chance for human error to miss some. Is there any way I could use GREP to only apply the character style to the names and not the "and", "defeated", "in" aswell as any of the title wins (which will all be slightly different) and the times and special characters such as ":" and ";"? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[FRIdNGE · Accepted solution]

Simplistically, 3 Para Styles + 3 Char Styles associated to 3 Grep Styles:

(^/)  The Jedi

[CRen1995]

Thanks for your reply!

Sorry I am really new to this so I've got a paragraph style already for the text.

And I'm manually applying a character style to change the non bold text to bold.

How would I go about changing the paragraph and character styles over to the format you said?

 

[FRIdNGE]

Contact me in private. I will need your InDesign file to fix it.

(^/)

[FRIdNGE]

The way to play:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/cgy4u8ijui3pqwe3pnteb/JUN-5-The-Wrestling-Yearbook-2001_FRIdNGE.indd....

[CRen1995]

Thank you so much! Looks amazing. I'm playing around with it now and I seem to be getting the hang of adding new lines to the GREP styles so thank you so much again!

[CRen1995]

Just a quick one. How did you apply the different paragraph styles to the individual lines and sub-headings without manually going through and changing them all individually?

[FRIdNGE]

I've added Grep Styles in the para styles options. See my screenshots in my first post.

(^/)

[CRen1995]

Thanks for all your help!