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• • September 19, 2019 at 10:51 am #1186762
    Michael Hamilton

    Participant

    So I have a huge document that has footnotes that I do not need. There are numbers in the text that must stay but the footnote numbers need to come out. They always occur before a letter, without a space. (like this: …at the end. 4Then you make your way…) I can find the numbers with: \d[[:alpha:]] or \d[\u] but I don’t know what to put in the “Change to:” in order to delete the number and preserve the first letter of the word. Also the footnote numbers are not superscripted or styled so I can’t search that way. Please help!!!

  • September 19, 2019 at 10:52 am #14324097
    Michael Hamilton

    Participant

    Thanks to all who help!

  • September 19, 2019 at 4:13 pm #14324096
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    \d+(?=\u)

    where is a word break – there is a “word character” at its right, so there should not be a word character to its left –, \d+ is any sequence of digits, and the final part is a lookahead ensuring the next character is an uppercase.

    You can replace it with nothing.

  • September 19, 2019 at 5:11 pm #14324095
    Kal Starkis

    Member

    Yep, I was about to say that a positive lookahead is what you need… This means that the letter needs to be there, but it won’t be included in the matched text.

  • September 20, 2019 at 7:41 am #14324092
    Michael Hamilton

    Participant

    Thank you so much, it worked!
    I noticed that I have other numbers just after letters and punctuation. Any code for this?
    Example: “…the satellite.3 The space between…” I have other numbers that need to stay unaffected like this: “5 The point of the…”
    The numbers I need to keep all have an end paragraph before them and a space after them. Everything else must go.
    Thanks again for your help!!!

  • September 22, 2019 at 4:47 pm #14324085
    Kal Starkis

    Member

    Michael, try defining your problem in words like this… I’m looking for a number that occurs AFTER a character that is NOT a whitespace, and BEFORE a whitespace. From there, you can refer to a regex cheatsheet (https://www.rexegg.com/regex-quickstart.html) or even use InDesign’s built-in cheatsheet (the little dropdown menu to the right of the GREP search field) to convert your sentence into regex.

    What you’re looking for occurs ‘after’ something. This indicates a positive lookbehind—in other words, something must occur BEFORE we start matching any text. A positive lookbehind looks like this: (?<=…)

    One way to represent ‘a character that is NOT a whitespace’ is by \S. So the positive lookbehind now looks like this: (?<=\S)

    ‘a number’ is, as Mr Jongware pointed out, simply a string of digits: \d+

    What we’re looking for occurs ‘BEFORE’ something. This indicates a positive lookahead—in other words, something must occur AFTER our match. A positive lookahead, as Jongware pointed out, looks like this: (?=…). A whitespace is represented by , so our positive lookahead becomes (?=).

    Put it all together, and we have:
    (?<=\S)\d+(?=)

    When you test this, you might find a problem. It matches the ‘234’ in ‘1234’. That’s because the digit ‘1’ also satisfies the criteria ‘NOT a whitespace’. So how would you fix this? You could change your sentence to ‘NOT a whitespace or a digit’. ‘OR’ logic can start getting confusing, but regex has a really nice way of matching a set of possible characters. You just put all the options in square brackets. For example, [abc] will match a, b, OR c. [\d] will match a whitespace OR a digit. But we want to match everything that is NOT one of these characters. We can do that by inserting ^ after the opening bracket like this: [^\d]. Here, the ^ means ‘NOT’.

    So now our improved regex looks like this:
    (?<=[^\d])\d+(?=)

    We could have done the same thing with a NEGATIVE lookbehind. The ! in a negative lookbehind also means ‘NOT’:
    (?<![\d])\d+(?=)

    If you’re an absolute beginner with regex, I wrote a very basic tutorial which you might find useful: https://inkwire.app/articles/getting-started-with-regular-expressions.html

    There are some links at the bottom of that page for more useful resources.

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