Adobe Indesign GREP Help

[ChromeZero]

Not so great at GREPs for Adobe Indesign. Would anyone care to help me figure out a GREP statement for the following scenarios:

1) Find letter x which occurs before letter a, ie 'xa'. Apply character style 1 to x.
2) Find letter combo xx. Apply character style 2 to the first x of this combo.

Any help would be much appreciated. I have an account on adobe.com, but i can't create threads there for some reason. This seemed like the next best place?

 

[macstudent]

I would recommend posting your question to the forums on www.indesignsecrets.com.

GREP questions get answered very quickly there.

 

[MiltK]

Grep assist?

Hi All,
I’m trying to write a grep to convert improperly styled times on a calendar to the proper style.
I want the grep to find “am.” and change it to “a.m.”
But since there is the possibility of having an “am.” being part of a show title such as “Sam I am.” I wanted to use a look behind to exclude an “am.” that is preceded by an “I” and a blank space.

The negative lookbehind grep I was writing looks like this:
\s(am\.)(?<!I\s)

I also tried a positive lookbehind for an am. preceded by a space and a digit to narrow the types of am.s that could be selected
\s(am\.)(?<=\d)

The first one still selects the “am.” following the “I” and the space.
The second selects nothing.
Any ideas on how to use a lookbehind to select only the “am.” following a digit and a space?

 

[jamietshaw]

Find: (x)a
Replace: $1


Find: (x)x
Replace: $1

 

[superscape]

Hi,

I did some work on InDesign regular expressions recently and I found this cheat sheet really useful. Take a look, it might help you too - especially positive and negative lookaheads. ;-)

http://www.jetsetcom.net/images/downloads/list_of_grep_symbols.pdf

Good luck!