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• • December 18, 2013 at 10:21 am #66448
    Jonathan Scott

    Member

    I have a GREP expression that almost works correctly but not quite. If anyone is willing to take a look at it, please comment and I’ll post the code and the problem. Thanks.

  • December 18, 2013 at 2:42 pm #66455
    Matt Mayerchak

    Participant

    I am willing to take a shot at it. I also know of a GREP group on Facebook that may be of help . . . so, if your GREP is over my head, I’ll ask the group if they would like a new member!

    Post away!

  • December 18, 2013 at 5:08 pm #66457
    Jonathan Scott

    Member

    I convert files for printed books into ebooks and need a code to automatically add anchors and links to manuscripts that have hundreds and hundreds of footnotes. So far GREP has been able to do a good job, except this expression that’s intended to create an anchor (a id=”#”) based on the footnote number. It will only return the first digit of the footnote, so that footnotes 10 -19 return as “1” and 20-29 return as “2”, etc. I’m just not savvy enough to spot the error.
    SEARCH EXPRESSION: (<span class=”xfootnote”>\[<a href=”#r)(\d+?)
    REPLACE EXPRESSION: $1$2
    I apologize in advance for being so stupid. Thanks!

  • December 18, 2013 at 5:22 pm #66458
    Matt Mayerchak

    Participant

    What is the question mark for in the 2nd set of parens? It should work with just (\d+).

  • December 19, 2013 at 8:56 am #66460
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    The question mark is indeed the cause of the malfunctioning.

    By default, GREP is Greedy: the operators ?, +, and * will match as much as possible (right until the rest ofthe expression puts a stop on it). If an expression ends with one of these, it will continue matching as much as possible until the repeated expression no longer matches. A question mark changes this: after a ?, +, or * will make it match as *little* as possible.

    So what happens on a string of digits, such as “abc123efg”? Using “\d+”, it will match the entire set of digits “123” — as long as possible. With the added question mark “\d+?” it will match *as little as possible* (while still being a valid expression), and so just “1” is already enough.

    In the OP’s case this happens because the Repeat modifier is at the very end of the GREP expression. If there is anything in the epression *after* this Repeat modifier, such as “\d+?” (digits but with a next lowercase letter), then GREP has no other option than to match “123e”, because the shortest *possible* match MUST include all digits.

    • December 19, 2013 at 9:00 am #66461
      Jonathan Scott

      Member

      Thank you both. That’s a part of GREP that I’m not familiar with. Can’t tell you how much this helps.

  • March 10, 2014 at 9:53 am #67530
    Laszlo Peregovits

    Member

    I am a new comer in grep. I tried to change with GREP find & replace function the words within brackets to a character style (without changing the brackets itself) with the following grep expression: (?<=\(-.*?(?=\))

    Starting the search it does not found any such string though there are plenty in the text. What is wrong with the expression.

    Similar task would be to apply a character tag for a words begins with opening parenthesis, the word to be changed until a hyphen (the hyphen should not be changed).

    Thanks a lot in before hand

    Laszlo

  • March 10, 2014 at 10:38 am #67531
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Laszlo: I think the code you want is (?<=\().+?(?=\))

    • March 10, 2014 at 4:05 pm #67537
      Laszlo Peregovits

      Member

      Dear David,

      Thanks a lot. How to apply a character tag for a string starting with an opening parenthesis, following the word to be changed terminated by a hyphen (the parenthesis and the hyphen should not be changed).

      Have a nice day

      Laszlo

  • March 10, 2014 at 4:10 pm #67538
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Laszlo: I think you would need to apply it with two different GREP Styles — one for the first half and one for the second half.

  • March 10, 2014 at 5:15 pm #67542
    Matt Mayerchak

    Participant

    If you’re using find/change, not a GREP style. . . it sounds to me like you just want to use a positive lookbehind for an opening paren, followed by a string of Word characters (one or more), followed by a positive lookahead for a hyphen. If that’s correct, then you could apply the character style to what you find.

    If that is the case, you can do all of this via the dropdown menus in the find/change dialog box – see if you can figure it out! If you get stuck, write back and I or someone else can post the correct grep code. But I bet you can figure it out from the menus . . .

    Did I miss something?

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