Controlling GREP Greediness
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This article appeared in Issue 72 of InDesign Magazine.By nature, GREP is greedy. Regular expressions match as much text as possible, regardless of what you intended. If you search for all text within parentheses—using the expression (.+)—you’ll get every character that appears between the very first opening parenthesis in a paragraph through the very last closing parenthesis in that paragraph. That’s fine if there’s only one set of parentheses in the paragraph, but it’s definitely not what you want when there are several sets of parentheses. So how do you rein in GREP’s greediness?
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