Reply To: Indesign grep – Applying character style to a letter on the third tab

Hi Jeremy

Wow that diagram is clever way of illustrating the grep and is very helpful.

I must have got lucky then because when searching for ‘A’ i typed: .+.+\K.*A(?=(?!£)) i placed the A after the asterisk and it seemed to work
but looking at your breakdown it should be: .+.+\KA(?=(?!£))

There are sometimes commas, parentheses in the third tab location for example when searching for A and the third tab can sometimes look like this:

A, B, B, G
B [7, 35]
A, A (Frozen) 

Therefore the grep search skips it but ill try and figure out how to ignore commas etc as i think i’ve asked much of you already. I think my main mental hurdle is completely understanding the various uses of positive and negative lookahead and behind and the sequencing of the expressions but your diagram has helped me get somewhat closer….at times its been like staring at a car engine and having no clue :)

This is something i really want to grips with but unfortunately i don’t have one of those minds that are proficient with formulaic equations so its going to be alot of trial error, i have to admit i had all but given up before your help. I was preparing myself to tediously manually copy and paste each entry.

Thanks for your time and patience Jeremy its greatly appreciated.