InStep: GREP

How to grok GREP By Sandee Cohen

The new GREP tab in InDesign You know you’re a geek when you get excited about
CS3’s Find/Change opens a the Find/Change dialog box. But this dialog box has
long been a powerful tool for efficiently handling large
powerful set of commands. amounts of text. Now, in CS3, the Find/Change dialog
most common problems in imported text. We’ve
also included a file with the raw text. This file,
named “GREP Example,” is attached to this PDF
document. Open it and you can follow along.

Figure 1:The imported text in this three-fold brochure spread is full
of weird characters typical of text from email messages. Removing
the characters and reformatting by hand would be tedious.
1
box has gotten a complete overhaul, and it’s not just
a little better… it’s total geek heaven. Not only can Examine the text for searchable patterns
you now search for object attributes (such as color, The text in each of the text frames is
strokes, and so on) and special glyphs, InDesign CS3 typical of the kind of text that might
lets you use GREP expressions for use in search strings. come in from email documents. We need to
GREP (which
���������������������������������������������
stands for General Regular Expression apply the Signature paragraph style to the text
Parser) wasn’t
����������������������������������������������
invented for InDesign CS3. Programmers that is preceded by an em dash (�Figure 2)�.
have used GREP for years to wrangle complicated
search-and-replace operations within files.
With GREP, you can build searches that contain
specialized substitutions and wild cards. For instance,
you can look for all the text between parentheses
and apply a character style. This seemingly simple
task is basically impossible without GREP.
Chances are, you’re not a programmer. So
why should you care? Because once you get past
the mindset that you don’t need GREP, you’ll be
amazed by how much time you’ll save. And since
the Adobe engineers have included premade
search strings for some of the most common search
requests, you don’t even have to know the codes. Figure 2: The text contains many strings of characters and non-
printing characters that need to be cleaned up. Our first task is to
This tutorial, which documents the creation of restyle the text that comes after the em dashes..
a brochure for a fictitious Hawaiian visitor center
(Figure 1), will help you understand how to use
GREP expressions to quickly clean up some of the

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 InStep: GREP

Tip: Save your queries

What makes this a GREP challenge is that we
don’t want to style any text that simply contains an
em dash within the regular body text paragraphs.
Once you have designed your own searches, you can
easily save them for future use. (This isn’t just GREP
searches, it also includes, Text, Glyph, and Object a tiny trashcan). Then click Change All to delete all
searches.) the angle brackets that are followed by one or more
Just click the Save Query icon next to the Query list. spaces. Your text should now reflect the changes
This opens the Save Query dialog box where you can

2
Use the new Find/Change dialog box
As soon as you choose Edit > Find/Change,
you’ll notice the tabs that let you select each
of the four types of searches (Figure 3). The Text
tab gives you controls similar to previous versions
of InDesign. The GREP tab gives you the controls
for regular expression searches. The Glyph tab lets
you search and replace specific glyph characters.
shown in the portion of text shown in Figure 4.
name your query.
The query then appears inside the preset list. This
list is divided into four sections. The first section is for
Text searches, the second for Grep searches, the third
for Glyph searches, and the fourth for Object attribute
searches.
What’s really cool about this list is when you choose
one of the presets, the tab automatically changes to the
correct type of search.

3
The Object tab lets you search and replace object
attributes. To do GREP searches, click the GREP tab. Delete multiple characters and spaces
Our next cleanup task is to delete the
angle brackets. It’s simple to find those
brackets; type > in the Find What field.
However, there may be more than one bracket on Figure 4: The text as it appears after the quoted angle brackets and
each line. With a simple Text search, we’d have to run spaces are deleted.

Figure 3: The four category tabs, Text, GREP, Glyph, and Object, in
the Find/Change dialog box let you switch between each of the
types of searches..
the search several times. With GREP we can set the
search to look for multiple instances of the brackets.
Choose Repeat > One or More times from the
Special Characters for Search menu to insert a +
after the bracket. (Of course, once you know that
code, you could just type the + character yourself.)
This find several angle brackets in a row.
However, we also need to delete the spaces after
the angle brackets. So type a space and then another
+ sign (indicating one or more space characters).
Leave the Change What field blank and click the
Clear Specified Attributes icon to the right of the
Change Format section (that’s the icon that looks like
4
Find characters in position
We can find the code for the em dash in
GREP searches by choosing Symbols >
Hyphens and Dashes > Em dash from the Special
Characters for Search menu (Figure 5). This
inserts the code ~_ into the Find what field.
However, there are other em dashes within the
text that we don’t want to convert. So we need
to specify only those em dashes that begin
paragraphs. Put your insertion point at the front
of the Find what field (before the ~_ code) and
choose Locations > Beginning of Paragraph.

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 InStep: GREP
Figure 5: The Special Characters for Search menu makes it easy to
insert the GREP codes into the Find what or Change to fields.
This inserts a ^ in front of the em dash code:
^~_, which means “look for all em dashes at the
beginning of a paragraph.” We can then click the
Specify Attributes to change icon for the Change
Figure 6: By leaving the Change to field blank, you can assign a
paragraph style to all the text in the paragraph.
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Format field. (If you don’t see the Change Format
field, click the More Options button in the Find/
Change dialog box.) Then choose the paragraph
style you want to apply; in this case, Signatures.
The Find/Change box should appear as
shown in Figure 6. Click the Change All dialog
box to apply the Signature paragraph style. Even
though the Change to field is blank, it does not
delete the text in the Find what field because
we’ve told InDesign to apply formatting.
5
Delete spaces that may not be there
It’s rather simple to delete the forced line
breaks (sometimes called “soft returns”): Choose
Forced Line Break to insert the GREP code \n. The
challenge is that some of those line breaks have
a space in front of them while others don’t. If we
simply delete the breaks that aren’t followed by a
space, we could have two words jammed together.
Tip: Watch the codes
Many searches under the Text tab are similar to those
under the GREP one. But you need to insert different
codes depending on which section you’re in.
For instance, under the Text section a tab character is ^t,
while the GREP code is \t. But if you think that the only
difference is the caret or the slash, look at a paragraph re-
turn. In the Text searches, the code is ^p, but it’s \r under
the GREP section. See the table attached to this PDF for a
complete list of all the Text and GREP search codes.
If you’re like me and you enter your codes manually, in-
stead of using the search menus, you need to remember
under which section you’re working.
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Tip: Wrangling Telephone Numbers
A slick way to learn how to work with GREP is to use one
of the presets under the Query list and then dissect the
code. My favorite is the Phone Number Conversions (dot
format).
The Find code is \(?(\d\d\d)\)?[-. ]?(\d\
d\d)[-. ]?(\d\d\d\d). This finds the three digits
for a US area code, then the next three digits before the
hyphen and then the next four digits after the hyphen.
What makes this code particularly clever is the use of
the ? symbol which indicates that the .elements can ex-
ist “zero or one”time in the string. So the code [-. ]?
means that a hyphen, dot, or space may or may not exist
between the digits.
The Change code uses the codes $1.$2.$3. The
code $1 inserts the items indicated by ( )’s sets in the
Find field. The code $2 inserts the second items. And the
code $3 inserts the third items.
Using these found codes allows you to add a a period
in between the digits.
If we replace all line breaks with spaces, we could
get two spaces in a row, requiring another cleanup.
GREP gives us the flexibility to search for
something that may or not exist. The ? code says that
something can exist zero or one time. We can also use
the Wildcards > Any White Space to insert the code
\s. This ensures that we capture all types of spaces.
With the expression \s?\n we look for any
white space that may or may not be there, followed
by a line break that will definitely be there.
We then enter a single space in the Change field.
This means that only one space will replace the
line breaks. For those line breaks that don’t have
a space before them, it will avoid word collisions.
For those line breaks that do have a space before
them, it avoids creating multiple spaces.
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 InStep: GREP
6
Delete multiple returns
Here’s another task that could be handled in an
ordinary Text search: Look for two paragraph
returns and replace them with a single return.
But, as anyone who has ever done such a search
knows, you have to rerun the search several times
when there are three or more returns in a row.
Happily, Adobe included a preset query to
handle this situation in a single search. You can
choose the preset by using the Query menu
at the top of the dialog box (Figure 7).
When you choose Multiple Return to Single
Return, InDesign inserts the strings for both
the find and the change fields. ~b finds a
standard carriage return; \r looks for that and
column breaks, frame breaks, and so on.
Figure 7: The Query menu comes with presets for different Find/
Change routines. You can also save your own queries.
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Figure 8: Now we’ve taken care of those pesky forced line breaks.
The + sign indicates that the second break
character appears one or more times. So if there is
another break character after the second one, that
character will also be included in the found text.
Now, your text should look like Figure 8.
7 Find text with quotes
Our last cleanup task is the hardest: We need
to find a certain text string, delete part of
the found text, and style the remaining part. Look
at the words “Waikiki Park.” We want to apply the
Italic character style to the text within the quote.
But we also want to delete the quotation marks at
the same time. The trick is to use a wildcard, which
remembers a portion of the found text so that
we can “insert” it again in the Change to field.
We can get the code for quotation marks under the
submenu for Quotation Marks. The code for a double
left quote mark is ~{. The code for double right quote
mark is ~}. We can use the submenu for Wildcards to
insert the codes for any uppercase letters (\u), any
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lowercase letters (\l), any digits (\d), any spaces (\s),
any character (.), or any word characters (\w). If we
add the * after each character code, it will find any of
those characters that may appear zero or more times.
However, this code isn’t quite ready to do what we
want, as you’ll see in the next step.
8
Change just the text inside the quotes
With the code as it stands in the previous step,
any changes we apply in the Change Format
field will be applied to all the found text. But
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we
need to style just the text within the quotes.
Fortunately, there’s a way to specify just one
part of the found text that should be changed.
We need to separate the code into three groups
using parenthesis. So we now write the code
as (~{)(\u*\l*\s*.*\w*\d*)(~}).
Tip: Searching for an email address
Suppose you want to find all email addresses in text and
apply a special character style. [\l\u\d_%-]+@[\l\
u\d_%-.]+ is the code that will find any valid email
address. The \l wildcard finds any lowercase letters.
\u finds any uppercase letters. \d finds any digits. The
period finds characters such as periods. The underscore,
percentage sign, and hyphen were added as those
characters are not included in the wildcard codes.
The square brackets tell InDesign to search for any one
of these characters. The + indicates that these charac-
ters can appear one or more times. The @ sign is outside
the group, as it can appear only once. The group is then
repeated for the rest of the address.
Once the email text has been found, it’s simple to use
the Change To formatting to apply a character style.
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 InStep: GREP
Figure 10: InDesign has replicated the text and formatting changes
you see here on every page of the brochure .

In that code string, the first parenthetical group is

for the open quote. The second group is for any found
text within. The third group is for the close quote.
Once we’ve divided the code into these groups,
we can insert the code $2 (or choose Found 2 under
the Found Text menu) into the Change to field to style
only the second group. This not only lets us style
just the inside text, it also automatically deletes the
text that was in groups 1 and 3 (Figure 9). One page
of the finished result of our efforts is in Figure 10.

Figure 9: As if by magic, the quotation marks disappear, and

InDesign italicizes the text that was in-between them .

Going Further with GREP

While GREP may seem daunting, if you start with basic
exercises such as these, you can quickly work up to
very sophisticated searches. I did it, and I’m hardly a
code geek. In fact, if I can grok GREP, anyone can!
Sandee Cohen is the author of InDesign CS3 Visual Quickstart
Guide and a columnist for InDesign Magazine. She is also a frequent
speaker for the InDesign and Creative Suite conferences.

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