GREP of the Month: Reveal Codes

Normally, you can’t target text with mixed formatting in a GREP search. But with this workaround, it’s a cinch.

A limitation of GREP searches (and of normal text searches too) is that everything you’re looking for must be in the same style. Thus, it’s not possible to formulate a GREP expression along the lines of “find certain punctuation in italic that is followed by a non-italic space.” This can be a bad limitation, but fortunately there’s a way around this problem: you can reveal all or some formatting codes.

Using GREP expressions, you can temporarily add HTML-like tags that spell out formatting in a way that you can use and manipulate. For example, to show all italic formatting, enter .+ in the Find What field, <i>$0</i> in the Change To field, and then set Italic in the Find Format panel and Regular (or Roman, or whatever the non-italic style is called) in the Change Format panel (Figure 1). The find expression matches everything in italic. The replace expression uses $0, which stands for “whatever was matched by the find expression.” Instead of the HTML-style tags <i> and </i> that we used here, you can of course use any form: %i% and %/i% would do fine too, as would @i@ and #i#—it doesn’t matter much.

Figure 1: A GREP Find/Change to wrap all italic characters in tags that you can use in another GREP operation.

After running this query, your text could contain things like ;</i> (where there’s a space after the closing angle bracket). To find italic punctuation followed by a non-italic space, we can now

search for [:;,.]</i>x20 (you’ll recall that x20 stands for the space character). To get that punctuation out of italics, search using the GREP expression ([:;,.])</i>x20, and use </i>$1x20 as the replacement string.

To reinstate the italic formatting, use the Find What string <i>(.+?)</i>, the Change To string $1, and set Italic in the Change Format panel (make sure that you leave the Find Format panel blank).