GREP in InDesign

Locations

InDesign GREP recognizes seven find locations, though the interface includes only five (see Figure 6). The first three of these are used to get the equivalent of Whole Word in a Text search:

\<	Beginning of word. Example: \<under finds all instances of under at the beginning of a word. All the location matchers can be combined with wildcards. For instance, to find all words that begin with under, use \<under[-\w]+. This formulation ensures that we find hyphenated words as well (under-age, under-the-counter).
\>	End of word. Example: stand\> finds any occurrence of stand at the end of a word. To match whole words that end in stand, use \w+stand\>. Note that since \w+ means “at least one character,” the word stand is not found, which is correct if you want to search for words that end in it. Later we’ll see how to include the whole-word stand as well.

Figure 6. GREP locations supported by the interface

\b	Word boundary. This covers both beginning and end of word. This means that \<cat\> and \bcat\b are equivalent. With \< and \>, there’s no real need for \b; it’s there probably for compatibility reasons.
\B	Not word boundary. Searching for \Bunder\B finds under in thundering but not in understand and blunder.
^	Beginning of paragraph. Example: ^\d finds all paragraphs that start with a digit. Note that when ^ is used at the beginning of a character class, ...