GREP in InDesign CS3

Leftovers

There remain a few things that are available in InDesign's GREP interface but that haven't been covered. In the Modifiers flyout are two sets of modifiers, Single-line On/Off and Multiline On/Off, both of which influence the behavior of the . wildcard ("match everything") and the location markers ^ and $ at paragraph endings.

Single-line mode determines the behavior of ., which matches nearly everything. When Single-line mode is off, which is GREP's default state, .* matches everything from the cursor position to the end of the paragraph. Enable single-line mode (with (?s)), and .* ignores line endings, selecting everything from the insertion point to the end of the story. If there is no insertion point and you have a text frame selected, (?s).* selects the whole story—not just the text in the selected text frame—including any overset text.

The multiline settings influence the behavior of ^ and $. When enabled, which is GREP's default state, ^ and $ match the beginning and the end of each paragraph, respectively: they respect paragraph boundaries. Disable multiline mode with (?-m)), and ^ and $ ignore the paragraph boundaries, in effect becoming beginning-of-story and end-of-story markers—synonymous with \A and \z.