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• • September 8, 2021 at 11:07 am #14347042
    theobear

    Member

    I’m trying to format the attribution of a quote that is inside parentheses after the quote… the trouble is sometimes there are parentheses inside the quote.

    So:
    This is a quote from a famous writer (and sometimes the writer uses parentheses) but the attribution is also in parens

    is there any way to select the last instance of a set of parentheses and everything inside?

    This is what I used: \(.+\)$

    but it selects

    “(and sometimes the writer uses parentheses) but the attribution is also in parens. (Attribution)”

  • September 8, 2021 at 12:15 pm #14347049
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Can you provide a couple good examples of things you are trying to format?

    • September 8, 2021 at 7:03 pm #14347053
      theobear

      Member

      Thank you David and Dhafir, Dhafir, That worked! can you tell me what exactly that code is doing?
      Poking around some old files (it’s funny how you sometimes solve the same problems over and over. :) I found this solution. I have no idea why, but this one works too:

      \([^)]+\)$

      if you know what that is doing I would be interested to know why this one works too.

      Thanks again!

    • September 9, 2021 at 12:18 am #14347054
      Dhafir Photo

      Participant

      Hello! Your regex finds set of parentheses only in the end of paragraph, but my regex finds find the last set in anywhere

      \([^)]+\)$
      \( open parentheses
      [^)] any character except the close parentheses (this form is called negated character set)
      + one time and more (but you should use here +? to make it shortest match)
      \) close parentheses
      $ end of paragraph

      .*\K\(.+?\)
      . any character
      * zero or more times
      \K keep all the before outside the matching
      \(.+?\) the same above

    • September 9, 2021 at 4:22 am #14347055
      theobear

      Member

      Thank you so much!

  • September 8, 2021 at 4:41 pm #14347052
    Dhafir Photo

    Participant

    To find every last set of parentheses use this: .*\K\(.+?\)

  • September 9, 2021 at 4:43 am #14347056
    Nick B

    Participant

    You already have your answer on how to achieve the selection, but in case you wanted to know why your original suggestion didn’t work, the “.+” will include any intervening opening or closing parentheses, so it:

    – finds the first “(”
    – matches “.+” (including any parentheses)
    – matches the “)” at the end per the rule

    If there was no closing parenthesis then obviously even though it matched the first two parts, the expression would return nothing. So as others have pointed out, you just have to make sure the middle rule is matching what you want, i.e. no opening parentheses, in which case when it finds the first “(” it will not match the expression but when it gets to the last “(” it will.

    • September 9, 2021 at 11:46 am #14347070
      theobear

      Member

      thank you for the clear explanation!

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