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• • July 14, 2011 at 7:36 am #60050
    Jean-Claude Tremblay

    Participant

    I have a request (more a challenge than a real case) from a friend. He ask me if it was possible using Grep searching to select a paragraph (and apply a style) but only when this one is preceeded by another paragraph that contain a specific word.

    I can select the paragraph containing “myWord” with this:

    .*(?<=myWord).*/r

    or this

    .*myWord.*/r

    or this paragraph and the next one using this:

    .*(?<=myWord).*r.+$

    But what I need is only selecting the second paragraph. I'm lost… Is it possible?

    Thanks!

    Jean-Claude

  • July 14, 2011 at 8:32 am #60051
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    Cannot be done. (Admittedly, I've said that before on a number of occasions and got proven wrong …)

    The reason is, to apply your style only the next paragraph, you need a Lookbehind containing “myWord” and its own hard return. (Look, backslashes! One: r Two: \r Three: \r — you need to type two to insert one, and so on. :D ) But between the myWord and hard return, you need a non-quantifiable repeat-anything code — your dot-asterisk — and that makes the Lookbehind invalid. InDesign's GREP library just can't do it.

    If you need this in a real world situation and really can't afford to miss one, you'd probably work around it by first giving all paragraphs containing “myWord” a color, extending up to the paragraph return and one character beyond it (!), so you can search for “any character” in that particular color at the start of a paragraph.

  • July 14, 2011 at 1:50 pm #60055
    Jean-Claude Tremblay

    Participant

    Hi Jongware!

    Good to see I was not looking at something obvious without seeing it. ;-)

    Thanks for your suggestions. I will give it a try.

    JC

  • March 25, 2014 at 2:25 am #67736
    Masood Ahmad

    Participant

    It’s too late to revert back to the old post. I was just searching something and found this. JC, I hope you might have achieved this already. Your query is interesting, so I think to give it a try…

    Might be I’m wrong, could you please check and let me know if this is the right code for your query:

    Find what:
    (.+\r)(?=.*myWord.*)

    Change to: paragraph style of your choice.

    The code works fine for me unless you do not have blank lines in between. It applies a style to a paragraph if the next para contains myWord.

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