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• • January 3, 2020 at 1:54 pm #1221022
    Drew Bingham

    Participant

    Hi there! I’m trying to apply a GREP style to a series of terms and I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around it. I’m trying to isolate the vowels in the phrase “short a,” “short e,” “short i,” etc. I want to make a style that will italicize the “a,” “e, “i,” etc.

    I’ve tried using positive/negative lookbehind/lookahead, but I can’t seem to get it to work. Still fairly new to GREP. Any tips?

    For additional context, I WAS able to make essentially the reverse work, targeting the first letter in terms like “L-Blends,” or “R-Blends” and make those italic with [\u]+(?=-Blend)

    Any info is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

  • January 3, 2020 at 2:31 pm #14323342
    Drew Bingham

    Participant

    I figured it out! Woot!

    Just in case anyone is curious, this is what worked for me:

    (?<=short)(a|e|i|o|u)

  • January 3, 2020 at 3:45 pm #14323341
    David Popham

    Participant

    Another option is (?<=short)[aeioi].

    Also, if there is a particular character that always follows the vowel, such as a space or punctuation mark, you may want to include that in your expression to prevent non-wanted italicization from occurring, such as the “a” in the phrase “short and sweet.”

  • January 3, 2020 at 3:47 pm #14323340
    Drew Bingham

    Participant

    Awesome tip, thank you!

  • January 5, 2020 at 6:25 am #14323335
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    To prevent more than a single letter being matched, add a word break after your vowel:

    (?<=short)[aeiou]

    But – rather than using a GREP Style for this, I’d recommend a plain (GREP) find & change. It’s way easier to correct if you want to exclude a few occurrences, and I recommend “sticky” formatting for stuff that needs it, reserving GREP styles for stylistics only.

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