Reply To: Grep – Any White Space – CS3

… whoa! I cannot copy and paste that expression to here! Something about InDesign or the Mac OS clipboard converts the grep expression to a bunch of white spaces!…

Surprise, surprise! It's an Adobe thingy — it works the same on Windows. I bet it was some smarty pants programmer's Finest Hour, since it means if you use copy-and-paste between an ID document and the regular Find box or the GREP Find box it automagically translates any special character into the correct shortcut representation. (Try it: copy some special characters from your text into the Find box — here they become the circumflex thingies — and then paste them into the GREP box — they'll translate to tilde-something something.) And yes, it is a bit annoying if you try to copy something out of InDesign …

JC, I'm having a hard time imagining did not work at all in CS3. I'm pretty sure I've used it a few times. By the way, I recommend to not use it! I found its habit of also including the paragraph return totally unacceptable, so for just spaces, I use the slightly longer expression

[ ~s~S~<~>]

(and perhaps a couple more). The longer expression is not a problem because that's what “Save Search” is for :-D