Joe wrote:
I have about two hundred text boxes which are captions of student pictures produced by Bob Stucky’s contact sheet script. The captions are actually the file name in this format: LastName_FirstName.jpg. I need to change to FirstName (space) LastName (no file extension).
Sounds like a job for super GREP! Try this: Open the Find/Change dialog box and switch to the GREP tab (this is in CS3 and later). Type this into the Find what field:
^(\w+)_(\w+)\.jpg
Type this into the Change to field:
$2 $1
Now click Change All. That should do it!
Here’s how to decode the grep codes:
- ^ means “beginning of paragraph”
- (\w+) means “remember what the first group of one or more word characters are”
- _ is literal — that is, it’s just looking for an underscore character
- \. means a period/dot (you have to “escape” that character with the backslash before it)
- .jpg is also just literal
- $2 $1 means “take the second word group you found (the stuff in parentheses), then type a space, then type the first word group you found”
There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on June 5, 2009
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