regexadobe-indesigngrep-indesign

InDesign GREP find between

In InDesign's GREP search I'm trying to get parts of a text field which was filled with a CSV (file using # as delimiter). The reason I want to grep the different parts is to give each a different character style.

The Textfield content looks like this:

Alpha#60x50cm#Acryl
Beta#2013#50x40cm#Öl
Gamma#2013#50x40cm#Holz
…

Using

^[^#]+

would work fine to get the first part of each line, (which is delimited by the first hashtag)

enter image description here

How would Grep pattern look like to get:

In every line.

Solution

  • In the InDesign UI, you can

    1. search for ^[^#]+ to match the contents of the first field;
    2. search for (?<=#)[^#]+(?=#[^#]*#[^#]*$) to match the contents of the second field;
    3. search for (?<=#)[^#]+(?=#[^#]+$) to match the contents of the third field;
    4. finally, search for (?<=#)[^#]+$ to match the contents of the fourth field.

    This relies on all lines having exactly four fields (and thus 3 #), and will match only the text in between two # markers. Here is an image showing the result with these four applied as GREP styles:

    grep styles to highlite fields

    As you can see, the applied attributes overlap nowhere, so everything is only marked once.

    Another way is to use Javascript. All of the lines can be split on the # character (the command is called split), and that returns an array of the text in between. However, this converts the text into a plain Javascript string, and it takes some trickery to translate the result "back" to native formatted text.