Is [[:punct:]] the only representation of punctuation proper?

[dublove]

Is [[:punct:]] the only representation of punctuation proper?
Is there a simpler one?

[Eugene Tyson · Accepted solution]

You can build your own punctuation character set like this:

[.,!?;:'"(){}[\]<>/@#$%^&*+=_|\\-]

This is messy, prone to errors (you have to remember to escape ] and \?), and incomplete, depending on the characters you remember to include. Plus, it's easy to forget obscure punctuation like ¿, ¡, „, etc.

Another way is to use something like

\W (non-word character)
\W matches any character that’s not a letter, digit or underscore, so it includes punctuation but also:

spaces

tabs

symbols

line breaks

So you technically try [\W\D\H]

That would ignore words digits and horizontal spaces (not tested ... don't fret if it doesn't work I'm not on my computer).

So the POSIX for punct is the most comprehensive way.

Why do you ask?

[dublove]

I just want to ask for a simple representation.

[dublove]

Well, if there's no single letter to represent it, then we'll settle for [\W\D\H].

[Eugene Tyson]

Just noticed it catches paragraph returns

So to make it better

[^\w\d\r\n\h]

Similar to [\W\D\H]

where it's using a range [ ] 

and looking for non word characters \W instead of \w - and same for \d finds digits \D finds anything but digits etc.

Here we use the same logic

but the ^ excludes the items from the search. 

So you have the range [ ]

[^ ] range of non inclusion 

[^\w] don't include word characters  etc 

[Eugene Tyson]

Ah now I figure out that
[^w\s]
does the same thing 
But also catches mathematical symbols 

Where this doesn't

\p{Punctuation}

this also works

\p{Punct}

It really depends on your needs GREP is GREP - it finds what you ask for it's very precise and doesn't guess.

[dublove]

\p{Punct}

New knowledge.
It's [^\w\s]right?

[Eugene Tyson]

You can always grab @Joel Cherney list in the link and test it. 

[Joel Cherney]

You can always grab @Joel Cherney list in the link and test it. 

I am always in favor of testing!

Seems like accents are neither word characters nor punctuation.  There are other exceptions as well - currency symols, box drawing characters, arrows, and so on. 

[Peter Kahrel]

There's also \p{Punctuation}

[Eugene Tyson]

Was trying that as \p{P} but didn't expand it to the full word! 
AMAZING! And probably catches more things than the the posix - is that right, like smart quotes?

What else is there in the hidden gems of GREP? 

Seriously!

[Joel Cherney]

I hate to disappoint you, Eugene. Unfortunately, I believe that \p{Punctuation} captures exactly what [[:punct:]] captures. I grabbed the text of this handy list of Supposedly All Unicode Punctuation, dropped the text into InDesign, and used Change All to figure out how many punctuation glyphs would be found.

\p{Punctuation} found 1672 glyphs

[[:punct:]] found 1672 glyphs

Seems to me that they capture the exact same glyphs. 

Also, @dublove, that might be a feature request you'd like to file: InDesign GREP should support abbreviated Unicode categories. There are a bunch of them, many quite useful, but they'd all be easier to use in InDesign if we could just e.g. type \p{Pc} instead of \p{Connector_Punctuation}

[Eugene Tyson]

Amazing! This opens up so many possibilities. 

I knew about it in Regex but they didn't work in the past, typing out the full word, that's disappointing but opens up a lot of workarounds! 

Amazing!

[Peter Kahrel]

The abbreviated forms, too, work in InDesign. Unfortunately they're not documented (as so many other Grep things), but they're all in this script:

https://creativepro.com/files/kahrel/indesign/grep_classes.html

[dublove]

Hi  Peter Kahrel ~

I saw this great thing of yours the other day.
I think though, wouldn't it be a little better if it stored the user's Grep.
Because I think it would be less likely to lose the Grep in the script.
Because scripts don't need to be on the C drive, it supports "directory.link".

[Peter Kahrel]

> a little better if it stored the user's Grep

> it would be less likely to lose the Grep in the script.

> scripts don't need to be on the C drive, it supports "directory.link".

The purpose of the script is simple: it lets you look up and insert Grep codes. That's all.

What do you mean by these comments? I can't make much sense of them.

[Joel Cherney]

The \p{P} abbreviation doesn't work for me in the Find what: field in the  GREP tab of Find/Change dialog. My hunch is that a) it's a bug in the F/C dialog that b) you may not have noticed because c)  you probably never key regular expressions directly into the F/C dialog, right? I suspect that the abbreviations work in ExtendScript just fine. 

[Peter Kahrel]

The short form is \p{P*} -- the addition of the asterisk is a feature of Boost's regex libraries, which InDesign's Grep is based on.

> you probably never key regular expressions directly into the F/C dialog, right?

I do that all the time!

> I suspect that the abbreviations work in ExtendScript just fine.

JavaScript's (and therefore ExtendScript's) regular expressions are very basic, it doesn't know about Unicode classes.

[Joel Cherney]

1000x thanks for this. I am completely unashamed of tripping over Boost vs PCRE (again) but I should not have a hard time remembering that it's still 1999 as far as ExtendScript is concerned.