Reply To: Grep to ital between commas if it contains an ' and two numbers

Ah, you're using Find & Change because there just may be oddball sentences. Yeah, GREP styles are great in applying your styles everywhere that fulfill the requirements, but there is no easy way of having it ignore one particular sentence …

Just FYI, your '80s mixer can be ignored in three ways. You might want to give either a try if you are finding too much false matches.

First one is adding the period to the 'scan-for-end-of-italics' command. In effect, nothing may follow the digits except a comma or period, and only if it's then followed by a comma, it's a good match (i.e., comparing will end on the next comma or period, and only if there is a comma it's “good”).

(?<=,)[^,]*~]dd(?!d)[^,.]*(?=,)

The other method relies on the difference in the year notation: the two digits must be followed by a space or a comma, like this:

(?<=,)[^,]*~]dd(?=[,s])[^,]*(?=,)

Also, if the year is always immediately followed by the ending comma, as in your original example, this is the most simplest case:

(?<=,)[^,]*~]dd(?=,)

which will effectively only match comma, all other stuff except comma's, year, comma (and exclude the comma's at start and end).