Need Grep help

[Nousheeth]

I want to remove the space before some punctuation like sapce before period, space before coma, spce before question mark etc.. 

Can I remove the spaces with single GREP or indesign script. 

Help me to find the right solution

Thanks in advance

[Mike Bro · Accepted solution]

Hello @Nousheeth,

You can do it with a single GREP like this...

Search for \s+([!,\.:;?]) and replace it with $1 (in the search, include whatever punctuation symbols you want inside the brackets, but remember to 'escape' reserved characters with a back slash \ like what's done with the period).

Regards,

Mike

[Peter Spier]

I don't think you need to escape the . inside a class.

[Peter Kahrel]

> I don't think you need to escape the . inside a class.

Correct.

[Nousheeth]

Thanks Mike

Its Working 

[Peter Spier · Accepted solution]

I would use a class like [,.?!;:]  with the punctuation you want to find as a look-ahead. You want to be careful, though, because there are legitimate places where space before punctuation is expected, quotation marks, parentheses and brackets for example, so the general class [[:punct:]] would not be a good idea, and some sorts of whitespace may also be legit, such as tabs and paragrap returns.

From Peter Kahrel's book I find that \p{space_separator} finds any white space other than tab or return {not sure if that covers both hard and soft returns, both of which I think you would want not to be included), so you might try starting with something like \p{space_separator}+(?=[,.?!;:])

I have not tested this...

[Peter Spier]

Forgot you would want to replace with nothing.

[Peter Kahrel]

> \p{space_separator} finds any white space other than tab or return

Correct.

[Peter Spier]

Does it omit both forced line breaks and paragraph breaks?