Adobe InDesign CS3 - Manual (Page 144)

INDESIGN CS3
User Guide
137
• Use parentheses to divide your search into subexpressions. For example, if you want to search for “cat” or “cot,”
you can use the c(a|o)t string. Parentheses are especially useful to identify groupings. For example, searching for
“the (cat) and the (dog)” identifies “cat” as Found Text 1 and “dog” as Found Text 2. You can use the Found Text
expressions (such as $1 for Found Text 1) to change only part of the found text.
GREP search examples
Follow these examples to learn how to take advantage of GREP expressions.
Example 1: Finding text within quotation marks
Suppose you want to search for any word enclosed in quotation marks (such as “Spain”), and you want to remove the
quotation marks and apply a style to the word (so that it becomes Spain instead of “Spain”). The expression
(")(\W+)(") includes three groupings, as indicated by parentheses ( ). The first and third groupings search for any
quotation mark, and the second grouping searches for one or more word characters.
You can use the Found Text expressions to refer to these groupings. For example, $0 refers to all found text, and $2
refers to only the second grouping. By inserting $2 in the Change To field and specifying a character style in the
Change Format field, you can search for a word within quotations marks, and then replace the word with a character
style. Because only $2 is specified, the $1 and $3 groupings are removed. (Specifying $0 or $1$2$3 in the Change To
field would apply the character style to the quotation marks as well.)
GREP example
A. Finds all word characters enclosed in quotation marks B. Change applies only to the second grouping C. Character style applied
This example searches only for single words enclosed in parentheses. If you want to search for phrases enclosed in
parentheses, add wildcard expressions, such as (\s*.*\w*\d*), which looks for spaces, characters, word characters,
and digits.
Example 2: Phone numbers
InDesign includes a number of search presets that you can choose from the Queries menu. For example, you can
choose the Phone Number Conversion query, which looks like this:
\(?(\d\d\d)\)?[-. ]?(\d\d\d)[-. ]?(\d\d\d\d)
A
B
C