This InDesign tip on making space characters visible in GREP was sent to Tip of the Week email subscribers on September 14, 2017.
Sign up now and every week you’ll get a new tip, keyboard shortcut, and roundups of new articles, plus exclusive deals sent right to your Inbox!
Just scroll down to the bottom of this page, enter your email address, and click Go! We’ll take care of the rest. Now, on with the tip!
Space characters are often not so easy to spot in GREP expressions. To make them visible in your code, use \x{0020}, which is the Unicode notation for the space character. Or use the code , which stands for any white space (including paragraph breaks and tabs).
For example, set[-]?up has the same meaning as set[- ]?up but is much clearer since someone looking at the code doesn’t have to guess if there’s a space there, or what is meant by the invisible space after the dash.
This article was last modified on July 25, 2019
This article was first published on September 19, 2017
Commenting is easier and faster when you're logged in!
Recommended for you
A Script to Find/Change All Documents in an InDesign Book
A script by Peter Kahrel allows you to apply a Find/Change to all documents in a...
URLs: Breaking (Badly)
With the help of GREP styles, you can solve the problem of bad breaks in long UR...
Tip of the Week: Making White Space Characters Easier to Work With in GREP
How to make whitespace characters visible in GREP expressions in InDesign.