Moving a comma/period from the beginning of the paragraph to the end

[meilech12]

I have a whole bunch of text where the punctuation got messed up and the commas and periods are at the start of the line/paragraph, instead of the end. I have the same issue with ... but those are rare.

I'm looking for a script or a trick to fix all the text at once.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

An example would help, here, if you can share a snip of the text. But I'm having trouble envisioning a situation where a period, a comma or an ellipsis is "at the wrong end" in any consistent fashion that would lend itself to Find/Replace or GREP.

You could, for example —

• Find/Replace all periods with nothing.
• Find/Replace all paragraph ends (^p) with period-para (.^p)

...and so forth. But that assumes a lot of consistency of the formatting all the way through, with (for example) no periods except at the beginning and to be moved to the end of a paragraph.

Is it possible to back up and get cleaner copy to start with?

[meilech12]

Thank you for the quick reply!

It's song lyrics, which is why some lines finish with a comma, some with a paragraph, and some don't have any punctuation.

Here is an example:
We are one
,since way back in time
.Unified at our start
,We began as a nation to live
.And believe with one heart

[Joel Cherney]

I'd bet money that your text has accidentally had right-to-left text direction applied (it's trying to treat those commas and periods and ellipses as if they were Arabic). I assume that you have plain-vanilla English InDesign installed, and don't have these buttons on your Paragraph panel?

 

If you do, you can just switch back to left-to-right paragraph direction. But this spontaneous right-to-left setting bug does occasionally happen to users of English-localized ID. If you've used paragraph styles, it's easy to resolve by switching from the World-Ready Composer (which supports RTL scripts like Arabic and Hebrew) to the normal Adobe Paragraph Composer (which does not). 

[Willi Adelberger]

In which languz is the text? If it is Western or European Text, go to the paragraph style settings and change from a World Composer to Adobe Paragraph Composer. 
it is found in Paragraph fine tuning. 

[brian_p_dts]

Using James' idea, you can use GREP: 

Find: (\r)(\.+|,)

Change: $2$1

[meilech12]

Your find suggestion does a great job finding the punctuation, but change moves up the punctuation to the previous line, instead of moving it to the end of its current line.

Maybe there is a way to do 3 groups,
1 - the punctuation,
2 - all the text till the end of the paragraph
3 - the paragraph break
and exchange group 3 with 1 

After that we can do you previous suggestion to move it up to the previous line.
Is this doable?

[brian_p_dts · Accepted solution]

Oh. If you want to move paragraph to end of it's current line, the GREP is:

F: ^(\.+|,)([^\r]+)

C: $2$1

[meilech12]

Thank you so much! This finally worked.

I'd be happy if you'd explain the codes you used in the find

[brian_p_dts]

^ = start of line.

\.+ means one or more periods. We use backslash to escape period, which when unescaped means any character

| means or

, means comma

[^\r]+ means any number of characters that are not a return

Wrapping the two expressions in parentheses means we can references them in the change as $1 and $2. In this case, we reverse the two sets of finds