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• • June 6, 2019 at 2:35 pm #117075
    Ian Freeman-Lee

    Participant

    Hello! I’ve been getting into GREP styles finally, and they are super freaking cool. Can’t believe I put it off all these years.

    I have successfully gotten a style working which applies my character style to any text before a “:” character IF a “:” exists in the paragraph. This is the style: .+?(?=:)

    My question is: is it possible to make this even smarter and only apply the character style to the first set of characters followed by a colon? Right now if the paragraph contains a second colon somewhere it will apply my character style to all the text up to that second colon instead of up until the first one.

  • June 6, 2019 at 2:48 pm #117076
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Congrats on getting into GREP, Ian!
    Yes, you can start the expression with a caret ^ to force it to start at the beginning of the paragraph.

  • June 11, 2019 at 3:48 pm #117139
    Ian Freeman-Lee

    Participant

    Hey David, thanks so much for the reply! What you suggested worked, but I don’t totally understand why it worked. I now understand that ^ means start of the paragraph, but what does GREP do if you don’t have that there? Is it starting from the end instead?

  • June 12, 2019 at 8:17 am #117151
    Jeremy Howard

    Participant

    Hello Ian,

    When you include “^” in your expression, you are basically anchoring the expression to a specific point on the front end. Before you added that part to your expression, the GREP was searching more generally and essentially looking for any characters that appear before “:” at any point, anywhere in your text.

    Make sense?

  • June 12, 2019 at 9:45 am #117153
    Ian Freeman-Lee

    Participant

    Aw, OK. That does make sense, thanks. I had been wondering how it parsed everything, so that actually answers more questions than just this one!

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