JS CS5 - trying to apply saved GREP expressions to specific paragraphs

[Iain Robinson]

Hi all

Been a long time since I looked at JS - the scripts I produced with the help of this forum have been running well (and saving us lots if time) but I have something new I need to do and I am quite rusty. Any help would be appreciated.

I have a few saved GREP expressions that I want to run on some particular text in my document but not others. The saved GREPs are run using this code;

app.loadFindChangeQuery ("change all text to black", SearchModes.grepSearch);

app.activeDocument.changeGrep();

My plan was to use a GREP search to find all paras and then go through all the paras and only apply the saved GREP expression to paras not styled with a specific para style. Unfortunately the GREP is applied to all all text regardless of the para style - the same as if it was run manually using the F/C interface. My code;

app.findGrepPreferences = app.changeGrepPreferences = null;

app.findGrepPreferences.findWhat = "^.+$";

f = app.activeDocument.findGrep ();

for (i = 0; i < f.length; i++) {

  if (f.appliedParagraphStyle.name!="References")

            {

            app.loadFindChangeQuery ("change all text to black", SearchModes.grepSearch);

            app.activeDocument.changeGrep();

            }

}

How can I get these GREP expressions to run only on the text I want it to run on? Do I have to first remove any instances of paragraphs with the offending para style from my variable f before my for loop?

thanks,

Iain

[Robert Kyle · Accepted solution]

in the last line, try this:

f.findGrep()

I haven't tested it but f is an array of text objects found by your first f/c operation, so you simply limit your second of/c to those chunks of text.

I also wonder if the second f/c is needed at all. Not sure what your saved query is doing, but if it's just changing the text color to black,  maybe you can just do that to each f

[Iain Robinson]

Thanks Robert. I changed my last line to f.changeGrep(); and that did it. I just couldn't make that leap myself - as I said, I haven't looked at this stuff for a while! In the if loop I'm going to run a whole slew of saved GREPs we already hold as this will be easier for me than doing them as JS.

Thanks again,

Iain

[Kai Rübsamen]

What is your saved query? "^.+?$" will find the whole para.

Why not search directly for your para with the specific style?

app.findGrepPreferences.appliedParagraphStyle = "test";
var res = app.activeDocument.findGrep();

Kai

[Iain Robinson]

Kai - thanks for your response. I expect the saved query (which was just an example - there will be many executed here) applies to all the text (".+") hence me trying to restrict it using JS to most of the different paragraph styles (quite a lot) but exclude one or two. These are saved queries we use a lot so I didn't want to mess around with them either (plus there are going to be a lot).

best wishes,

Iain