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• • November 8, 2017 at 7:37 am #99451
    Sally Ray

    Member

    Hi.
    I’m trying to amend some en dashes to hyphens in my InD doc but it can’t be a global change as I need to preserve some of them. Is anyone able to help with a grep?
    I need to change all en dashes that have a letter either side (so ignoring the ones with spaces) and change to a hyphen. This seems to work to find them [\u]–[\u] but I don’t know what to put into the ‘replace’ field.
    Thanks. Urgent as always so any help is appreciated.

  • November 8, 2017 at 9:14 am #99455
    Aaron Troia

    Participant

    Hey Sally,

    So it looks like you want to find en dashes between ranges of upper case letters. so to keep your letters wrap them in parentheses so something like (\u)~=(\u) (“~=” is the InDesign special metacharacters for an en dash, you can also just type an en dash, it works either way) the parentheses, or capture groups as they are referred to in Regular Expressions, will save those so you can use them in the replace field. you can also just replace what I have in the parentheses with what you were searching for that worked for you. In the replace field put $1-$2, the dollar sign-number combination refers to the each capture group from the search field. This will keep the letters on each side of the en dash and then replace it with a hyphen.

    Hope that helps, let me know if you have any questions about what I said,

    Aaron

  • November 9, 2017 at 3:31 am #99473
    Sally Ray

    Member

    Hi Aaron,

    Thanks for your reply. I’ve tried your suggestion. It only found the instances I needed by using [\u]–[\u] which is fine, it finds them… but when I replaced with $1-$2, it changed the physical content to be that (i.e. dose–response became dos$1-$2esponse).

    Am I doing something wrong? :(

    Sally

  • November 9, 2017 at 4:53 am #99475
    Graham Park

    Member

    Sally
    You need to use Parenthesis not Square Brackets to make the GREP a Marking Subexpression
    Use
    (\u)—(\u)

    Then replace with
    $1-$2

  • November 9, 2017 at 5:01 am #99476
    Graham Park

    Member

    Oops sorry, you need the Parenthesis outside then the Bracket to make it work.

    Find
    ([\u])—([\u])

    But If the Em Dash has any text or numbers and you want to change them all you can use
    (\S)—(\S)

    This will find an EM Dash that does not have a space either side of it
    Or even (.)—(.)

  • November 9, 2017 at 5:54 am #99477
    Sally Ray

    Member

    Without wanting to swear with delight THANK YOU Graham. :)

    p.s. is there a difference if I want to do with just for letters or just for numbers?

  • November 9, 2017 at 6:00 am #99478
    Graham Park

    Member

    For letters use

    ([\u])—([\u])

    For numbers use

    (\d)—(\d)

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