GREP in InDesign

Power Searching with GREP

This Short Cut deals with InDesign’s GREP feature, covering InDesign versions from CS3. GREP is a stable feature; the only big change occurred in CS4 with the introduction of Unicode properties. In addition, CS4 introduced GREP styles, though these don’t influence GREP expressions, only the way in which they are applied. This edition of the Short Cut therefore covers all InDesign CS versions to date.

The next section, Grep by Example, offers a quick illustration of a handful of useful features of GREP that should win you over straight away. It is followed by an outline of the organization of the GREP dialog. We discuss here how GREP operators can be picked from lists and how Unicode characters are entered. After that, starting at the section “Wildcards,” InDesign’s GREP features are discussed in detail. The section “Single Line and Multi-line” discusses some aspects of GREP that are probably not needed very often but are nevertheless useful enough to include here. The Short Cut concludes with a section on troubleshooting (a catalog of my own painful experiences) and a reference section that lists all the GREP language elements.