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• • June 12, 2015 at 4:41 am #75950
    Jahrod

    Member

    I want to find the first White Space in paragraphs and then add a Forced Line Break. The problem I get is it adds Forced Line Break to all spaces in my paragraph, where as I only want it to look for the FIRST and ONLY FIRST White Space in my paragraphs.

    For instance:

    ‘Today I want to be in the sun’.

    Should change to:

    ‘Today
    I want to be in the sun’.

    I’m quite sure this is possible but I cannot figure it out.

  • June 12, 2015 at 5:48 am #75952
    Justin Sligh

    Member

    Jahrod,

    Try the grep

    (^.+?)(\x20)

    Replace with:
    $1

    I was unable to find only the first whitespace character with positive lookbehind or \K. Might just be a lack of coffee. Instead, your grep looks for the first instance of one or more characters followed by a whitespace. You then break that up into two found sets using parentheses. For the replace, you call the first found set using $1 and then the forced line break

  • June 12, 2015 at 6:06 am #75953
    Eugene Tyson

    Member

    If I understand correctly

    ^ +

    Replace with

  • June 15, 2015 at 12:00 am #75965
    Jahrod

    Member

    Thank you, Justin, that works a treat! How exactly is that code working? I especially don’t get what the ’20’ is doing!?

    • June 15, 2015 at 7:23 am #75970
      Justin Sligh

      Member

      Jahrod,

      (^.+?)(\x20)

      \x20 refers to unicode for normal space created by the keyboard’s spacebar (U+0020). includes breaking spaces, which we do not want.

      ^ Beginning of paragraph.
      . Any character
      +? One or Many times (Shortest Match)

      () Parenthese encapsulates found text for use on the replace function.

      We cant do a positive lookbehind with the GREP ^.+? but we can find both and only use the second found set in our replace function.

      GREP Find
      “Find, as found set one, one or many characters (shortest match), which is followed by, as found set two, a normal space.”

      GREP Replace
      “Replace with $1, which was the results of the GREP within the first set of parentheses, and a forced line break.”

  • June 15, 2015 at 1:19 am #75966
    Jahrod

    Member

    Is it also possible to find only the last word of a paragraph and move it to a new paragraph?

    For instance:

    ‘Today I want to be in the sun’.

    Should change to:

    ‘Today I want to be in the
    sun’.

  • June 15, 2015 at 6:48 am #75969
    Eugene Tyson

    Member

    \w+.?$

    Change to
    $0

  • June 15, 2015 at 7:42 am #75973
    Justin Sligh

    Member

    Eugene’s GREP find/replace will do the trick.

    Go with the most simple solution based on the text. If you create a complex GREP, you are more likely to find undesired results.

    For the sample text you provided, \w+.?$ is perfect.

    If your text is is more complex with punctuation within a single word (e.g., hyphen, apostrophe), you might need something more complex. Here is an example of a more detailed GREP that takes care of words that have one punctuation mark.

    (?<=\x20)\w+[[:punct:]]?\w+?(?=[[:punct:]]+$)

    “Find one or more word characters followed by a possible punctuation, followed by possibly one or more word characters, which comes after a normal space and before one or more punctuations at the end of a sentence.”

    If your full text is as simple as the sample text that you provided, this excessive.

  • June 15, 2015 at 9:21 am #75980
    Eugene Tyson

    Member

    Yes, I was going to get into that, if there was a word hand-hyphenated then I would do what you have done there.

    It gets trickier with urls too.

  • June 17, 2015 at 12:28 am #76021
    Jahrod

    Member

    Justin and Eugene, thank you so much for your help and explanations. Such a huge help!

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