The same regular expression can be found, but why the GREP in the paragraph style cannot be recogniz

[dublove]

The same regular expression can be found, but why the GREP in the paragraph style cannot be recognized

\w\w\W*$

What's incredible for this expression?

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Try

\w\w\w*$

All three "w" should be small caps.

"\W" isn't a correct meta - so you get only two letter results - "*" means "zero or more".

https://www.indiscripts.com/blog/public/data/idcs4-special-characters/en_InDesignCS4-CS5-SpecialChar...

[dublove]

You don't understand what I mean
\w refers to any character (excluding space and punctuation)
\W contains space and punctuation.
They are different

I mean:
\w\w\W*$ can find the content, but it seems that it does not work in the paragraph style GREP.

Of course, no wrap is  difference  in Chinese and English.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I'm not sure where you're getting the information, but InDesign's implementation of GREP uses \W as the opposite of \w — any "non word" character instead of "any word character." It excludes letters and "word" punctuation like underscores.

• \w — a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and underscore.
• \W — any character NOT in the above list.

The wildcard for "any character" is a period, full stop - "."

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

@James Gifford—NitroPress

Do you have a link to ALL InDesign's GREP metas & switches?

[dublove]

I have attachments.
You can find the space and punctuation symbols with \W

You can also find the last 2 Chinese characters and punctuation with \w\w\W*$

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

In the InDesign? Can you post a link to info about that? 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

It's in Peter Kahrel's book, which includes a number of very obscure codes. I think the OP misread the nature of its function — it's inverse/exclusive, not more inclusive. But per the later post, yes, it finds both whitespace and punctuation, along with anything else not in the "word" list.

Other than my own reference sheet, I don't know of a good, absolutely complete list of GREP codes other than Peter's book. I don't even have \W (or a couple of others) on mine.

[dublove]

Yes, kahrel's book is great.
You share this good.
Are there more regular learning materials for electronic versions?

Thank you

[dublove · Accepted solution]

Well, I finally found the reason.
It is because \W contains \r
And $ before \r
So \W*$  Confuse it yourself

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I think the reason \W is rarely mentioned is that it's a catch-all with too many useless exceptions.

[Peter Spier]

Instead of \W you might want to try using the wild cards for what you are really trying to find, perhaps [[:punct:]] and \h to find horizontal whitespaces but not end of paragraph, new line or column/page breaks.

[dublove · Accepted solution]

Thanks.
\h is a good thing, I haven't noticed before.

Also \H is good thing.