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• • August 16, 2016 at 12:52 pm #87540
    AaronA

    Participant

    My aim is to change manually typed bullets (+ space) to bulleted paragraph styles.

    I’ve GREP’d it fine for changing all such paragraphs to a given style. But I also need to apply a different style to the last paragraph in each bulleted list (that style has a higher Space After setting).

    I figured I’d use a negative lookahead that looks for a paragraph start followed by a bullet character. I.e., if that’s found, it means we’re on the last of the bulleted items, and for that one we can apply the ‘last’ style.

    And I figured this is most easily done as the first GREP, before I change the others.

    Find what:
    (~8)()(.+)()(?!~8)

    Change to:
    $4

    But… doesn’t work. Any tips?

  • August 17, 2016 at 8:04 am #87546
    Kai Rübsamen

    Member

    Hi Aaron,

    this can be done in two steps!

    1. Remove manual bullets
    Find what: •\x20(.)
    Change to: $1 + applied bullet style

    … will find a bullet, followed by a space, followed by any character (the any character is needed, because you can either apply formatting or change something >> with this trick you can do both in one go!)

    2. Find the last bullet para
    Find what: \r(?!.) + applied bullet style
    Change to: nothing + + applied bullet last style

    … will find a return with applied style bulletStyle, if it is not followed by a character with the same formatting. So it will find the last return in a range.

    best
    Kai

  • August 17, 2016 at 11:30 am #87550
    AaronA

    Participant

    Hi Kai,

    Thanks for your response!

    I think your first ‘find’ must have gotten garbled in the forum formatting… ?
    I got it to work with this instead:

    ~8(.)(?# Find bullet character & space & any character)

    And the #2 routine works great. I just figured out why, so this is for the benefit of any other GREP novices: it looks to the first character of the next paragraph; if it does NOT match the specified bullet paragraph style, then the Change (to the ‘last’ bullet par style) is executed.

    Very helpful; thanks again!

  • August 17, 2016 at 11:43 am #87551
    Kai Rübsamen

    Member

    The first ones should be

    ~8\x20(.)

    To your explanation on #2: It looks not to the first character of the next paragraph, since lookararounds find only positions and not characters.

  • August 17, 2016 at 12:55 pm #87563
    AaronA

    Participant

    Thanks for clarifying.
    That’s the first I’d seen ‘x20’; is it the equivalent of ‘+’ ?

  • August 17, 2016 at 1:42 pm #87582
    Kai Rübsamen

    Member

    No. ‘\x20’ is the shortcut for \x{0x20}. This is another way to notate the unicode-value of a normal space. You can see this, if you select a space and read the value in the information panel.

    While includes all kind of whitespace, the tab, a shift return and a return, \x20 will find only simple spaces :)

  • August 20, 2016 at 3:16 pm #87668
    AaronA

    Participant

    A very late thanks, Kai, for clarifying! Never thought of entering unicode values, nor that they were shown in the Info panel. Cheers.

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