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• • February 17, 2022 at 8:19 am #14358795
    Brad Grigor

    Member

    In my text, I have cases where italics have been applied to only part of a word. I need to find these cases and either remove the italics style or apply it to the whole word. The challenge is to find just the cases of italics that aren’t whole words. But I can’t seem to formulate a Find/Change expression to do this. The problem is the Find character style option applies to the entire search expression. Is there another way to automate this search?

    Many thanks for your help!

  • February 17, 2022 at 8:42 am #14358801
    Petar Petrenko

    Participant

    Sorry if I posted more times the same reply, but when I hit the “Submit” button I can’t see my answer.

    • February 17, 2022 at 8:52 am #14358804
      David Blatner

      Keymaster

      Sorry, Petar. I’m not sure why that was stuck in moderation. I have approved it now.

  • February 17, 2022 at 8:51 am #14358800
    Petar Petrenko

    Participant

    Hi Brad,
    my opinion is that you can solve this only by using GREP. You can foind on Facebook a froup named “The Treasures of GREP” where you can ask the members to help you solve the problem.

    • February 17, 2022 at 9:33 am #14358805
      Brad Grigor

      Member

      Thanks Petar. There are times like this when having a Facebook account would be useful. :-)

      But even with GREP, is it actually possible to formulate a search where a style applies to only part of the search result, e.g. match <beginning of word><one or more non-italic letters><one or more italic letters><end of word>?

  • February 17, 2022 at 9:23 am #14358806
    Petar Petrenko

    Participant

    Thank you, David.

  • February 17, 2022 at 9:38 am #14358808
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Unfortunately, GREP only knows characters, not formatting. So I don’t think this is possible. (Happy to be proven wrong if someone else has an answer!)

    You might be able to figure this out by exporting the story as Tagged Text, and then using GREP on that plain text. It’s VERY geeky but it can work. I wrote about something like this here:

    GREP Find/Change on Formatted Text (solution to a big problem)

  • February 17, 2022 at 9:41 am #14358809
    Dhafir Photo

    Participant

    By 3 steps in GREP tab of Find/Change window:

    1. Add non joiner to the end of the italic:
    in Find: [\S]+
    in Find Format: italic
    in Change: $0~j

    2. Find non italic
    in Find: ~j\p{l*}+
    in Change Format: Italic

    3. Delete non joiner character
    if Find: ~j
    in Change: Leave empty

    • February 17, 2022 at 10:10 am #14358815
      Brad Grigor

      Member

      I agree with David–brilliant! Very mathematical thinking–change the unsearchable into something searchable, and then change it back. I’m going to try it. Thanks so much.

  • February 17, 2022 at 9:56 am #14358812
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Dhafir, that’s brilliant. Love it! Thank you. However, I think this will only work if the first part of a word is italic and the last part is not italic.
    If the first two letters of the word are not italic, and the rest are italic, you would have to do the opposite, yes?

    • February 17, 2022 at 11:10 am #14358821
      Brad Grigor

      Member

      “Do the opposite. . .”, yes indeed. I’m giving a try right now.

    • February 17, 2022 at 12:21 pm #14358839
      Dhafir Photo

      Participant

      Actually you can use global change for convert all words to italic:

      1.
      in Find: [\S]+
      in Find Format: italic
      in Change: $0~j

      2.
      in Find: \p{l*}*~j\p{l*}*
      in Change Format: italic

    • March 31, 2022 at 9:31 pm #14362670
      Tobias Wantzen

      Participant

      Thanks Dhafir for this excellent GREP you shared!

      But I’d not do this with a global “change to”. At least in my language (German) it is possible to emphasize part of a word by italicising it, which looks e.g. like this: “<i>weg</i>schauen”.

      For me this will be a “manual GREP walk” through my text.

      Thanks, Tobias

  • February 17, 2022 at 3:55 pm #14358859
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    What?! Dhafir… that is magic. Can you help us understand why this works?
    [\S]+ means “find one or more characters that that are either a horizontal space OR not a space”? That doesn’t make sense to me.
    And \p{l*}*~j\p{l*}* is really a mystery to me. I know ~j is the non-joiner, but… huh?!

    • February 17, 2022 at 11:48 pm #14358863
      Dhafir Photo

      Participant

      Hello David!
      Let’s to dive
      \S means any character except whitespace or break character, means horizontal white space and tab
      so [\S]+ with find format italic, will match everything in italic except breaks.
      Then put “non-joiner” (or any other zero width character such as “End Nested Style Here”) after the last italic character found.
      Now, you’ll find the letters before and after non-joiner, and make it italic, by: \p{l*}*~j\p{l*}*
      \p{l*} Any letter of any language
      * Does not exist or exists many times
      The trick is using the non-joiner as location pointing to the presence a letter \p{l*} in italic before or after it.

    • February 22, 2022 at 3:42 pm #14358955
      David Blatner

      Keymaster

      Intersting… but I still do not see why you include
      You do not want to include horizontal spaces that are italic, do you? It seems like \S+ would be enough. No?

    • February 22, 2022 at 11:38 pm #14359100
      Dhafir Photo

      Participant

      The main reason to include the horizontal space
      because if there one or more lines are italic, we need to specify the end of it only, not every word in it

    • February 23, 2022 at 12:20 am #14359101
      Dhafir Photo

      Participant

      More explanations
      \S+ Matching anything in italic except the space, so it will matching every word in the italic line
      [\S]+ Matching the end of the italic line, because we don’t need matching every italic word, but we need “Finding partial words in italics” as in the title!

  • February 18, 2022 at 2:40 am #14358865
    Godfried Vonk

    Participant

    Dhafir, just curious, why do you use [\S]+ in stead of .+?

    • February 18, 2022 at 6:15 am #14358868
      Dhafir Photo

      Participant

      There is no difference between the code dot .+ and this regex, but I usually use this because it’s faster than the dot in search. (For me)
      By the way, in this particular case, you can use many other codes or regex to catch the same result:
      .+
      \C+
      \p{any}+
      \p{assigned}+
      [\V\v]+
      [\W\w]+
      [\H]+
      [\D\d]+
      [\S]+
      or [\S]+

  • April 1, 2022 at 5:32 am #14362671
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Quick update: Mike Rankin explains this tip with images here:

    How to Find and Fix Partially Italic Words with GREP

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