GREP - Applying Character Style to whole word

[hannahg52363590]

I have a document that has words in a different langauge and those words need to be in a different font. In the word document I've placed they are all in the different font, so when I placed it, I searched for the font and applied a character style to it. To my dismay, at the end of typesetting, I've realized that only a few letters per word have the character style appplied. I have no idea why, maybe something isn't right in the word document, but if possible, I don't want to have to re-place and re-typeset. Is there a way to search for a character style and then apply it to the entire word that it's found in? 

[Jean-Claude Tremblay · Accepted solution]

You can do this in three step... 
First is to mark the text with the character style you need to fix. Let’s call it [ChStyle].

Step 1: Use this to mark the text by adding a # and remove the style
Find: .+ 
Find Format: [ChStyle]
Change: #$0
Change format: [None]

Step 2: Apply the style to entire word
Find: [\l\u]*#[l\u]*
Change: $0
Change format: [ChStyle]

Step 3: Remove the #
Find: #
Find Format: [ChStyle]
Change: empty

[David Popham]

Hi Jean-Claude, I think there is a typo in the Find expresssion in Step 2. It looks like it should be 

[\l\u]*#[\l\u]*. Perhaps the lowercase l was converted to the numeral 1 accidentally by the forum platform.

[Jean-Claude Tremblay]

It was a typo indeed. Edited.

[Scott Citron]

Wouldn't it simply be faster/easier to use InDesign's Find/Change or the Find/Change By List script to search for each word and apply the appropriate character style?

[FRIdNGE]

Step 1:
Find: \w+
Find Format: [ChStyle]
Change: #$0

Step 2:
Find: (\w*)#(\w*)
Change: $1$2
Change format: [ChStyle]

Change \w by [\w-] if you want to target composed words!

[FRIdNGE]

Warning:

The guy who indicated here Jean-Claude Tremblay's answer as "correct" is surely someone without a great Grep knowledge!

This could obviously mislead this thread readers because my answer is correct too and technically a little more interesting. Not to mention the fact I only use 2 steps and not 3!

(^/)  The Jedi