GREP in InDesign

Resources

InDesign’s GREP uses the Boost libraries; information on these libraries is available from www.boost.org, especially www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_38_0/libs/regex/doc/html/boost_regex/syntax/perl_syntax.html.

The best resource for regular expressions is -effrey E.F. Friedl’s Mastering Regular Expressions (O’Reilly). This title has a wealth of examples with detailed technical discussion about performance issues, and Friedl also provides interesting background and historical notes. Despite the high level of technicality here and there, the book is very readable, especially the first few introductory chapters. All the undocumented features I describe in this Short Cut are due to Friedl’s work: I simply tried several things he mentions to see if they worked in InDesign (and they usually did).

A tool to check which characters are matched by which character class is available at www.kahrel.plus.com/indesign/grep_mapper.html. Some more GREP tools are at www.kahrel.plus.com/indesign/grep_matters.html.

A more general kind of GREP tester can be found at www.rorohiko.com/greptutor/GrepTutor.html. This nice teaching tool lets you test any GREP expression.

A useful GREP analyser is -ongware’s WhatTheGrep (www.jongware.com/idgrephelp.html). This tool deconstructs GREP expressions and applies colour codes to different elements of an expression, thus making them much more readable.

Gregor Fellenz’s InDesign automatisieren (in German) contains an excellent chapter on GREP.

An interesting application ...