White spaces before and after punctuation marks-Is there a GREP?

[Farid Ely]

Hello my dear experts...

I was thinking of a viable solution for the wrong spaces before or after the punctuation points.

Is there an efficient way to use grep to remove the extra white space before the punctuation, and add the missing white space after the punctuation mark (except for the punctuation mark before the brackets)?

Sometimes messy drafts come to you and you need to fix these errors before moving on to work on them, and this has been repeated with me recently.

Thanks in advance.

[Peru Bob]

Please tell us what Adobe application you are using so that this can be moved to the proper forum for help.

[Farid Ely]

Oh, thank you very much. I was in a hurry and did not notice where I wrote. Thank you for moving the problem to its own section. Yes, I use InDesign.

[jane-e]

@Farid Ely 

This sounds like InDesign? If it is, we can move your post from Using the Community to InDesign for you.

Jane

[Farid Ely]

Oh yes, thank you very much. I was in a hurry and did not notice where I wrote. Thank you for moving the problem to its own section. Yes, I use InDesign.

[Nancy OShea]

I use a word processor (MS Word) to check spelling, grammar & punctuation before I export documents to other apps.  That gets rid of  99% of problems.

[Farid Ely]

Oh, thank you, but with my modest experience in Word, I think that this requires me to follow the correction process line by line. That's why I prefer InDesign because it usually saves time, especially through the Grep commands.

[jane-e]

@Farid Ely 

GREP will do this. I am not in my office now, but you can put each part into parenthesis to make them a group in the Search bar, then Paste only the groups you want.

Sorry, I can't remember the exact syntax, but if, for example, the text is "1. Heading" ,  you might search for (any number repeated)(.)(text) and replace with group 1, followed by Return, followed by group 3. It's faster than Word, and you can save your search.

Someone with give you the exact GREP code, or I can look at InDesign tomorrow and give you a better answer.

Jane

[Farid Ely]

Thank you very much Jane!  yes I will wait for more details from you. I am in no hurry; I was just asking to get information in case I face the same problem again.<3