Swap Names Around with GREP and Find/Change

Joe wrote:

I have about two hundred text boxes which are captions of student pictures produced by Bob Stucky’s contact sheet script. The captions are actually the file name in this format: LastName_FirstName.jpg. I need to change to FirstName (space) LastName (no file extension).

Sounds like a job for super GREP! Try this: Open the Find/Change dialog box and switch to the GREP tab (this is in CS3 and later). Type this into the Find what field:

^(\w+)_(\w+)\.jpg

Type this into the Change to field:

$2 $1

Now click Change All. That should do it!

Here’s how to decode the grep codes:

• ^ means “beginning of paragraph”
• (\w+) means “remember what the first group of one or more word characters are”
• _ is literal — that is, it’s just looking for an underscore character
• \. means a period/dot (you have to “escape” that character with the backslash before it)
• .jpg is also just literal
• $2 $1 means “take the second word group you found (the stuff in parentheses), then type a space, then type the first word group you found”

There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?

Comments (19)

Commenting is easier and faster when you're logged in!

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Name *

Email *

Website

Loading comments...