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• • June 18, 2013 at 10:16 am #33957
    Chris Lane

    Participant

    I have word files that are coded with angle brackets. Heads may be coded as <h1>; text coded as <t>. The text code is only on the first paragraph of text; meaning I may have the code <t> and then 10 paragraphs of text and then the code changes on the next head, such as <h1>. How can I grab onto all 10 paragraphs of text until the next code appears? I am thinking I need to use a positive lookahead but can’t seem to get it to work. It would be great if each paragraph of text started with the <t> code but that is not the case and I do not want to modify the word files supplied and add the code.

  • June 18, 2013 at 1:49 pm #33962
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    I guess it is failing for you because by default, GREP only works on single paragraps. You can force it to consider multi-paragraph matches by prepending the flag (?s) — this switches off “single line mode”.
    Try something like this:

    (?s)^<t>((?!\r<).)+

    This should match any sequence of single characters (including hard returns) where “the next match” does not equal a hard return plus a new “<” start-of-next-tag marker.

    You can apply your new paragraph styles this way, and in a second loop remove the ‘used’ <t> markers. I don’t think it’s safe to try both at the same time. Then again, from within a script this ought to be fast nevertheless.

  • June 19, 2013 at 12:18 pm #33975
    Chris Lane

    Participant

    Thank you! This works beautifully. I was close in all my efforts and the switching off of the single line mode was what I was missing. Scripting?—that’s my next learning adventure. Thanks again!

  • May 24, 2015 at 12:52 pm #75596
    amyb

    Member

    How would I modify this to end at the next bracketed code, which is at the end of the last paragraph of the string of paras I want selected? Following the OP’s example, it would be </t>.

    When I tried the GREP above, it skipped over that closing code and selected all paras until the next <t>

    Thanks!

  • May 24, 2015 at 2:26 pm #75598
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Amy, I see you wrote this on a blog post comment, too. There I suggested that you take a look at these articles:
    https://creativepro.com/styling-code-snippets-grep-styles.php
    https://creativepro.com/findbetween-a-useful-grep-string.php
    https://creativepro.com/favorite-grep-expressions-you-can-use.php

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