Look ahead/behind and delete the surrounding characters

[kylem80873098]

Hey,

So I don't really know anything about GREP apart from a brief explanation left by a previous designer at my work. I need some help with look ahead/behind stuff to make something bold or italics based on tags the writers create to let me know what style they are meant to be.

Basically I have sections of text come in like this:

Six-piece band <b>Neon Waltz<b> hail from (or near enough to) John O'Groats.

I need the text to be formatted like this:

Six-piece band Neon Waltz hail from (or near enough to) John O'Groats.

I can get GREP to change the format of the words to bold using (?<=<b>).+?(?=<b>) and having it change to the bold paragraph style but I am still left with the tags at the beginning and end of the words like this: <b>Neon Waltz<b>

Is there a code to delete the <b> tags at the same time as doing the style change.

I have similar codes with <i>words<i> for italics and <b><i>words<i><b> for bold italics but I can hopefully figure them out once I've got the bold fixed.

We had previous GREP searched saved onto my InDesign but since upgrading to 2017 I have lost all my previous settings and been trying to get them back slowly.

[Obi-wan Kenobi · Accepted solution]

1/

Find: <b><i>(.+?)<b><i>

Replace by: $1 + "Bold-Italic" char style

2/

Find: <b>(.+?)<b>

Replace by: $1 + "Bold"  char style

3/

Find: <i>(.+?)<i>

Replace by: $1 + "Italic" char style

(^/)

[kylem80873098]

thank you so much!

[Erica Gamet]

If you had the GREP queries saved in an old version, you can move or copy them to the new version. Go to the GREP folder in the Find-Change Queries folder.

On a Mac: Users/[yourname]/Library/Preferences/Adobe InDesign/Version x.0/en_US

On a PC: C:\Users\[yourname]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\InDesign\Version x.0\en_US

Copy the .xml file to the same location in the new version. Or just move them.