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• • August 31, 2021 at 9:18 am #14346760
    Geoffrey West

    Participant

    Dear Gods of GREP…

    I’m working on a calendar design using tables for each month. I have a request to add an [*] after certain dates and I’d like to style just the asterisk (date is one color, asterisk is another). I tried nested styles using digits as my parameter (up to 2 digits), but all the single-digit dates (1-9) don’t change when I go that route. My goal is to build this into a paragraph style, then package that into my cell/table style set-up to speed up the workflow.

    I feel like I’m missing one vital piece to make this work. Should I be using nested styles or is there a GREP expression that would work better?

    Help!

  • August 31, 2021 at 10:17 am #14346761
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    GREP Styles cannot add text, like an asterisk. You’d have to add that with something like a Find/Change. But after that, it’s not hard with grep styles to set up a pattern like: “Apply a color to all the asterisks that follow a number”

  • August 31, 2021 at 10:40 am #14346765
    Geoffrey West

    Participant

    Sorry, I was not clear in my initial write-up. The asterisks are already after the numbers, I was trying to change their colors only separate from the digits themselves. I said “add” but used it incorrectly.

    Do I need separate GREP expressions for single and double-digit numbers, or will one work for both?

  • August 31, 2021 at 10:56 am #14346767
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Ah! OK, that sounds good.
    The grep code \* will search for all asterisks.
    The grep code (?<=\d)\* will search for "all asterisks that immediately follow a digit"
    The code \d+\K\* will search for "all asterisks that follow a slash followed by one or more digits"
    Here is one challenge, though: If you have fractions that can cause problems. For example, these codes do not know the difference between 1/2 and 9/11.

  • August 31, 2021 at 11:39 pm #14346905
    Massimo Carrassi

    Participant

    You could assign a paragraph style to all dates and, in the Grep Style, assign the font style with the desired colour only to the character *.

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