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• • February 7, 2013 at 5:46 am #64083
    Steffen KÌÎÌ_rner

    Member

    Hi!

    I have a book with several occurrences of year-year (1890-1920). Almost all of these are using – instead of – or —. To find the events I use ^9-^9, but I only want to replace the character in-between the digits without effecting the digits. Is there a solution to this?

  • February 7, 2013 at 6:58 am #64084
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    For that you need to use the GREP tab of the Search-and-Replace dialog. Switch to that, then enter

    (?<=d)-(?=d)

    in the Find What field, and

    ~=

    in the Replace With field.

    GREP is about halfway between a regular text search and a full programming language; certain characters are found 'as usual', where other single or multiple character sequences are actually codes that trigger some specific behavior. For GREP, the special codes for 'any digit' is d and it works just like the regular ^9, but the extra codes around it: (?<=..) and (?=..) form Lookbehind and Lookahead sequences. These do the magic: the text inside is matched (i.e., it should be found) but it is not included in the Replace operation. So whatever digits are found, they are never removed; only the single hyphen inside is actually replaced with whatever you put in the Replace With field.

    See FindBetween: A Useful GREP String for a couple more examples, and the overview page GREP for a list of relevant pages.

  • February 7, 2013 at 7:00 am #64085
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    There are two ways to do this. Sandee Cohen taught me the first years ago, before grep: You search for ^9-^9 in the regular Text tab of the find/change dialog box and apply a character style. Then do another search for – (hyphen) in that particular character style and change it to an en dash. (Then you can find/change a third time to remove the character style if you want.)

    But the better way, now that we have grep, is to switch to the grep tab of the find/change dialog box and search for:

    (?<=d)-(?=d)

    and replace with the en dash. That code searches for any hyphen that has a digit before and after.

  • February 7, 2013 at 7:01 am #64086
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Drat! Theun beat me to it… you're just too fast! :)

    People are jumping out of their seats to help here at indesignsecrets!

  • February 7, 2013 at 2:51 pm #64094
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    David, nothing makes me sit quicker up than a chance to show off GREP to someone for the first time. :)

    Pre-GREP, I used a slight variation on Sandee's trick — I used to create a custom color swatch, so I could see what was happening, and when finished all I had to do was delete the swatch and replace it with black. A three-step approach — when GREP was added to ID's toolkit this became a one-step process.

    This particular search has been in my FindChangeByList list for years. I also have one that works for roman numbered ranges …

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