(In this case I'd avoid having italicized and regular parentheses right next to eachother. Changing Laurent's expression to

(?<=()[^)]+only(?=))

will do that.)

[ .. ] group definition

[^ .. ] not group definition — anything except what's inbetween the brackets

[^)] anything but a closing parenthesis

[^)]+ lots of characters, stop on the first encountered closing parenthesis

… but not tested … perhaps the ) needs a backslash? (I didn't think so, because you cannot define groups inside an inclusion group.)

The only solution I see is making it longer — replace every \w with [\u\d_] to catch only alphanumerics and underscore, add /? after the final break to include an optional final slash, and add (?=\.?) as the very last part to find, but exclude, an optional period.

I see an additional problem: the designcenter/…/workshop URL contains an ellipsis, which you definitely not want to include (as it doesn't mean anything in URLs). You should have left this as three periods in the original text. (And it seems you might have had five consecutive periods )

Why is it so important to find a shortest possible match? An URL just has a very complex syntax. To catch them all with a single expression, well, you just have to keep adding to a working expression up to the point where you are getting more false positives than you want. It is not as if you have to keep entering it manually into InDesign — that's what Save GREP Query is for.

Didn't you keep the original Excel file? It would — most likely — mean you have to re-do the formatting, but I don't think that'd survive the round-trip anyway.

Tables are correctly exported in RTF, so you can look at them in Word … well, I got stuck there as I'm not really into Word. Perhaps copy+paste would work from that into Excel.

Here's a suggestion. Convert the tables in InDesign to plain text, with a comma inbetween the values (the Convert-to-text allows you to change it from its default Tab). Then export to plain text, and import as CVS (Comma Separated Values) into Excel.

This does work even if the text contains comma's, tabs and hard returns — you have to replace them with something “safe” first, such as [ThisWasAComma] [etc.] before converting to text.

It will definitely not work for anything else than a pure plain table — in casu, merged cells and columns will be lost or mangled beyond recognition.

Anne-Marie, rest assured: that blue glow comes from my screen … really …

And I let my hair loose just for the picture!

If you end all with (?=\.?), it won't pick up a sentence ending period after the URL. With your expression such a period is used as part of the URLs. And I'm surprised the dash works in your expressions (or .. does it?). I think that in “[\w%-/]” it'll match anything from '%' to '/' — adding, for example, the plus sign and the comma. Well, perhaps you wanted it to.

(My personal variant is way, way longer — but it includes php's characters ?, =, & and then some more!)

Yah, but that wouldn't work in combination with regular (pardon the expression) numbers going the opposite way, would it?

I'd do it by hand for up to a handful of pages, but for >500, I'd write a script. Scripts are great at counting numbers.

[OT]:

A similar experience here — footnotes, created by hand the old fashioned way: separate frames, a line, main text frame shortened by hand … and all of that with InDesign CS3…