Run Applescript on Selection/Story/Document

These solutions are beyond my mental capacity at the moment, but thank you all for responding. At least this thread will be archived in perpetuity in case anyone else is ever looking for this. greenrookie​, Robert Kyle, and S Hopkins​.

Be careful. Remember selection returns a list and can return a number of item types. Check for the class of the item selected and then if "text" pass that to the handler and use its reference for your change grep. Also for the change grep preference I prefer using a character style set to no break. That way the modified text does not show up as an override.

set myRegEx to ("(January|February) (\\d{4})")

tell application "Adobe InDesign CC 2018"

  set selList to selection

  set selItem to item 1 of selList

  if class of selItem is text then

set selObj to a reference to selItem

  my doRegEx(selObj, myRegEx)

  end if

end tell

Something like this (as Rob mentioned, best to test if you have selected text first)

tell application "Adobe InDesign CC 2018"

          set mySelection to selection

                   tell mySelection

                             set myFoundItems to change grep

                   end tell

end tell

Well, it's been a long time since I've written any AppleScript, but the javascript syntax looks like this:

app.selection[0].changeGrep;

(which assumes that the user has selected some text beforehand. always a good idea to test that)

In your script, the "change grep" line is within a "tell application" block, which gives it a broad scope. Your solution will be something like:

tell selected text

     change grep

end tell

Or maybe it's "tell selection"?

Bob