GREP search and replace: numbers and commas

I have a list of numbers 1000, 15000, 250500, etc. and I would like to find only numbers that have 5 or more digitals, and insert a comma, like the following:
1000 no change
15000 replace with 15,000
250500 replace with 250,500
TIA

One note, the replace patterns in ID need to use $, so that would be $1,$2 - otherwise I think that will work fine.
You can also use curly brackets to indicate the number of possible occurrences of a pattern you're looking for.
(\s\d{1,3})(\d{3}\s)
Means find a space, 1 to 3 digits followed by 3 more digits and another space.
One little note, if you were to put a bunch of number separated by single spaces in a string, this would skip alternate ones, because the trailing space of one number would be considered part of the find pattern for that match, and so would not be available as the leading space of the next number. (That may be very badly phrased, sorry.) In that case I think you'd have to break those spaces out to lookaheads/lookbehinds, where you include them in the find logic without making them part of the matched string. (Which may have made this response even less intelligible, but are at least terms to look at in the documentation.)

Similar Messages

CS3: grep search to replace part of a string

Can I do a grep search for a string of text but only replace a portion of the string while leaving the remainder intact?
iMac G5, OS 10.5.5

In addition to Eric:
Find "some search string", Replace "some replacement string " also replaces part of the string, not touching anything...
But the GREP search has two advantages: First, if you define formatting in the Replace field (italics, superscript, a character style), only the 'search'/'replacement' part will be affected, rather than the entire found string (as in regular search).
The second big advantage is you can use any regular GREP single character wildcard in the 'left' and 'right' (matching-but-not-marking) parts. A few useful examples: '\d' (digit), '\l' and '\u' (lowercase and uppercase), '.' (any character), or even '[a-f]' (lowercase 'a' to 'f'). The only limitation is that you cannot use the once, zero-or-more, or once-or-more modifiers -- the strings must have a fixed length. FYI, those three modifiers are, respectively, ?, *, and +.
This restriction does not apply to the 'middle' string, the one you are going to replace anyway -- use whatever GREP you want.

Using footnote markers in a GREP search

In a 300 page document, with hundreds of footnotes, I want to insert thin spaces between single endquotes and footnote markers. The easiest way seemed a GREP search and repace. I search for (\’)(~F) and replace it with $1~<$2. The result is ’ ’ (endquote-thin space-endquote). When I try to replace AB to A-thin space-B in the same way, the result is right. So what's going wrong? (I also tried ~] for the endquote.)
(By the way, I have a workarround, but I'd like to understand how GREP searches work.)

Footnotes aren't really a part of the semi-official GREP definitions, and I imagine the Adobe programmers had to fix a couple of workarounds to make them work at all. They are not simply single characters (quotes, spaces, and possibly text variables are) but "contain" lots of other information, just like anchored objects do. That could be the reason they don't Play Nice with regular GREP operations.
In this particular case, you can work around it searcing for but not replacing the footnote marker code. Look for
(\')(?=~F)
and replace with
$1~<
The combo (?=~F) will find but not include the footnote code, and thus nicely circumvent the problem.

GREP search crashes InDesign

Hi,
I have a script which imports XML and formats it. As part of the formatting, there's numerous GREP searches which remove redundant spaces, returns and so on.
One in particular crashes InDesign and it's driving me nuts.
It's supposed to remove redundant returns in a table:
// GREP Search for redundant returns
app.findGrepPreferences = app.changeGrepPreferences = null;
app.findGrepPreferences.appliedParagraphStyle = "ArticleMinister";
app.findGrepPreferences.findWhat = "\r$";
app.changeGrepPreferences.changeTo = "";
app.activeDocument.changeGrep();
The problem is there's an XML closing tag between the carriage return and the end of the para, i.e. data{return}</closingtag>, but it works fine when the XML is data</closingtag>{return}.
Any assistance would be most appreciated.

Hi Vamitul,
Thanks very much for the reply and it makes perfect sense.
This script creates quite a complex document and, for some reason, moving the {return} outside the XML tags makes a mess of the document. I do not know why but I suspect that some of the 'clean up' non-GREP search and replace commands in the script are ignoring the XML data - perhaps not but I cannot for the life of me work out why a simple change is making the text a real mess.
So the 'harder fix' sounds like something worth pursuing as this is the last step in a long process. Do you have any more information about checking the xmlContents? I don't expect anyone else to do my work for me, but advanced (or even intermediate) scripting is something I struggle with.
Cheers,
Simon.

GREP: date/time search and replace

Hi everybody,
I frequently import XML files to InDesign. The XML structure always contains the following information among others:
start date
start time
end date
end time
For example, it looks like this:
21.08.2013
09:00
25.08.2013
18:00
Now I need to re-arrange these fields in one row, just like this:
21.08.2013, 09:00 - 25.08.2013, 18:00
I already found out how to do this via GREP, but I need to go one step further:
If "start date" and "end date" are the same (for example both are "21.08.2013"), I would like to skip the "end date" in the output. It should look like this:
21.08.2013, 09:00 - 18:00
Is there a way to do this via GREP?
Thanks in advance!

This will do it
Trevor
// By Trevor http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1261365?tstart=0
app.doScript("formatDates ()", ScriptLanguage.javascript, undefined, UndoModes.ENTIRE_SCRIPT, "GREP: date/time search and replace");
function formatDates ()
        app.findGrepPreferences = app.changeGrepPreferences = null;
        app.findGrepPreferences.findWhat = "\\d\\d\.\\d\\d\.\\d\\d\\d\\d\r\\d\\d:\\d\\d\r\\d\\d\.\\d\\d\.\\d\\d\\d\\d\r(?=\\d\\d:\\d\\d\r)";
        var doc = app.activeDocument,
              dateFinds = doc.findGrep(),
              l = dateFinds.length, dates;
        while (l--)
                app.findGrepPreferences.findWhat = "(\\d\\d\.\\d\\d\.\\d\\d\\d\\d)";
                dates = dateFinds[l].findGrep();
                app.findGrepPreferences.findWhat = "(\\d\\d\.\\d\\d\.\\d\\d\\d\\d)\r(\\d\\d:\\d\\d)\r(\\d\\d\.\\d\\d\.\\d\\d\\d\\d)\r";
                if (dates[0].contents == dates[1].contents) app.changeGrepPreferences.changeTo = "$1 $2 - ";
                else app.changeGrepPreferences.changeTo = "$1 $2 - $3 ";
                dateFinds[l].changeGrep();

Search and replace with comma

Hello All,
I want some help. Please help me.
I have comma delimited Data. When I’m converting Sting to Array, If two commas exists in between then its displaying “Zero” (because its array propriety ). Instead of that I want to display “NaN” .
Please give me any idea to replace comma to NaN. I tried with Search and Replace but it’s not giving as I expected.
Munna
Solved!
Go to Solution.

Hello GerdW,
Thanks you so much for your reply.
I thought, instead of replacing trailing comma by NaN adding comma before string is more better (because to many string manipulations) But, it’s taking more execution time.
Munna
Attachments:
Search and Replace.vi ‏415 KB

HTML character entities problem in saved regex search and replace query

I have a many search and replace regular expression queries (.dwr files) that I have saved. I have a problem specifically with saved queries that contain HTML entities such as "& nbsp ; " or "& shy ;" (spaces added otherwise code doesn't render in browser). For example if I use the following search:
([\d]{3}& shy ;[\d]{3}& shy ;[\d]{4}|[\d]{3}& nbsp ;[\d]{3}& nbsp ;[\d]{4})
(which searches for numbers in the 888-555-1234 or 888 555 1234 formats)
This will work fine if I manually enter it into the search text area. However if I save it to file and reload it, it will no longer work because the  and characters are now displayed as " " (space) and "-"(shy) rendering the saved query useless as it's no longer searching for the code. I have some fairly long and complex queries and this is becoming a problem.
Thanks for any help.
I'm currently using Dreaweaver CS4 at home and CS5.5 at work.

Thanks for your reply Kenneth, but that is not what I'm trying to accomplish. I'm looking for the HTML entities that exist in the source code which are & shy ; and & nbsp ; (without the spaces). As I mentioned above, if I enter them manually in the search box, I will get the corrrect results. If I save the search and then reload it, the special characters are no longer in HTML and the search is now useless.
Just for example again
In an open document in code view insert a number in the format (without the spaces): 888& nbsp;888& nbsp ;8888
Open a search dialog box and enter (without the spaces): [\d]{3}& nbsp ;[\d]{3}& nbsp ;[\d]{4}
The search will find that entry.
Save search as phone.dwr for example. Then load it and try the search again. It won't work because upon loading the search Dreamweaver replaces the HTML code which was saved with the rendered HTML. So now the search shows up as: [\d]{3} [\d]{3} [\d]{4} which will not find the string with hard coded non-breaking spaces that I'm looking for.
Basically I want to be able to save a search query for reuse. When I load a search query, I want it to be exactly what I saved, not something that DW has rendered (that doesn't work).

Search and replace string function

Hello, I am using the "search and replace string" function and it does nt seem to work consistently for me. I am using it in a situation where I am taking an array of strings, converting this into a spreadsheet string then deleting all of the commas. Has anyone experienced the same behavior? I have searched through other posts and found other simular faults but none of the fixes worked for this. I can post the code it needed.
Thanks,
Andrew

I agree that commas are often not desirable, especially if your software should also work in countries where comma is used as a decimal seperator.
Where are the commas coming from? Does (1) each element of the original array have one (or more), do you (2) use comma as seperator if you convert it to a spreadhseet string?
For (1), you might just strip out the comma for each element right in the loop. For case (2) you would simply use a different separator to begin with, of course.
Btw: you are abusing a WHILE loop as a FOR loop, because you have a fixed number of iterations. Please replace it with a FOR loop. If you use a FOR loop, LabVIEW can manage memory much more efficiently, because it can allocate the entire output array before the loop starts. For While loops, the total number of iterations is not known to the compiler. (Of course a real program would also stop the loop if an error occurs. In this case you would need to stay woth the WHILE loop. )
Do you have a simple example how the raw array elements look like. How many commas are there?
LabVIEW Champion . Do more with less code and in less time .

How can I search and replace fonts?

iOS 7 doesn't support the Adobe workhorse fonts I've most relied on for years, and arbitrarily changes them to iOS built-in fonts when I link my standard documents and templates to the iPhone, via iCloud. There's no apparent logic to how it does this; a Pages document in Minion Pro, a serif font, gets changed to the sans-serif Helvetica. Myriad Pro may come out in Times New Roman. I accept that the iPhone's limited number of fonts makes translation necessary, but does Pages offer a way in which I can search and replace inappropriately substituted fonts for more logical alternatives?

You noticed the first one yourself: the Found item list seems to randomly jump around the document -- I believe you are correct in your observation it may be due to the object construction order. That tells me, by the way, something about your lot numbers that tou didn't mention: your text is not one continuous long threaded story, but it's all or partially in disconnected etxt frames. The Found list does return everything inside a single story in the correct order, but it goes over each separate story in the order they were constructed.
The only solution is to gather all of your lot numbers, *re-sort* them according to the page number they appear on (and some sort of Worst Case Scenario is when you might have more than one lot number frame per page; in that case you also need to sort by textframe, top to bottom -- yet even worse is if you also may have these textframes side by side!).
Only then you have a reliable counting order.
This isn't too bad. We can just extend the method I offered for sorting top-to-bottom/left-to-right in Re: Working around the frame selection order issue in CS 4 and make it also include page numbers:
function byPageYX(a,b) {
    var
        aP = a.parentTextFrames[0].parentPage.index,
        bP = b.parentTextFrames[0].parentPage.index,
        aY = a.baseline[0],
        bY = b.baseline[0],
        aX = a.horizontalOffset[1],
        bX = b.horizontalOffset[1],
        dP = aP-bP,
        dy = aY-bY,
        dx = aX-bX;
    return dP?dP:(dy?dy:dx);
myResults.sort(byPageYX);
Or something like that.
As for actually implementing the above I cannot be of any help with Applescript.
Once we're dealing with sorting I think you're much better off in Javascript anyhow.

Search and replace, everey second character?

I'm making a VI that is communicating with an external device through a protocol built up of frames. I have made a couple of subVIs that put these frames together as hexadecimal strings that are then converted into numbers and passed on to the device. The protocol uses an escape character in order to avoid sending an BOF or EOF constant at the wrong time. I've made a subVI that is supposed to do this using the Serch and Replace function. At first it seems rather elegant, but it has a fatal flaw, if one of the characters it is supposed to hide is written across the edge of a byte, it will still be replaced.
Example:
11 01 00 EC 0D EA 05 08
is replaced by
11 01 00 E7 DE 0D EA 05 08
C0, C1, 7D are the characters to be replaced, 7D is the escape character.
Now I wonder, is it possible to make the search and replace function search only every second character in a string?
Solved!
Go to Solution.
Attachments:
Insert_Escape_Characters.vi ‏10 KB

Hi,
I'm not sure to understand your problem, but I propose this solution !
Hope it helps you.
Best regards,
Vincent
Message Edité par ramses64 le 02-20-2009 03:57 AM
V-F
Attachments:
replace.PNG ‏17 KB

GUI Based tool for search and replace using regular expression

Hi,
I have developed this small tool which can be used for search and replace in multiple files using reqular expressions.
Features:
1. Full regular expression
2. GUI based with Highlighted results
3. Preview for replace available
4. Pure Java based.
5. Its like unix sed and grep
Please visit below site for download/more information :
http://sourceforge.net/projects/regexsearchrepl/
Thanks,
Hitesh Viseria

I agree with you, it cannot compete grep/sed/awk combination. I couldnt find anything even close to grep/sed for windows which will also have a preview and most important, free. That is what made me write this tool. I am trying to
improve its performance and more features like history etc.
Any suggestions on additional features are most welcome.

Search and Replace help. Please

I have imported some text where in the original there is italic content but when bringing into IDCS4 that italic text shows up as _italic words_. That is as roman with _ characters surrounding it. Is there a way to search and replace. Needless to say the text between the _s varies.

I would try a GREP find/change searching for (_)([^_]+)(_) and replace with $2 Set the change formatting to italics (preferably as a character style). This translates to look for a _, then anything that is not a _, followed by another _, and replace with only the stuff in between. You can also use (_)(.+?)(_) which would match the shortest srting in between two _ characters in the same way (except it won't cross a paragraph break), but it will run a bit slower.
Credit for this should go to Peter Kahrel and his excellent GREP primer....

Search and replace formulas with AppleScript

Thanks to this forum I've found out that it is possible to search and replace text by other text or formulas with AppleScript in Numbers 3.2
Does anybody have a script to search and replace a formula or a part of a formula by another formula or a partial formula.
For example:
I would like to be able to find:
= Table1::$b$3
and replace this by:
= Table1::$b$4

De Signature,
Would this approach work for you...
This is a very neat way edit a complex formula in a single cell....
a) Copy and Paste the formula to a new black page in Pages,
b) Do your Find and Replace, then
c) Copy and Paste the formulae back into the cell in Numbers.
It works like a charm.
Here is an example of how I used this approach...
Original cell formulae:
=AVERAGE(
SMALL(OFFSET(K3,1,0,20,1),1),SMALL(OFFSET(K3,1,0,20,1),2),
SMALL(OFFSET(K3,1,0,20,1),3),SMALL(OFFSET(K3,1,0,20,1),4),
SMALL(OFFSET(K3,1,0,20,1),5),SMALL(OFFSET(K3,1,0,20,1),6),
SMALL(OFFSET(K3,1,0,20,1),7),SMALL(OFFSET(K3,1,0,20,1),8))
Final version of formulae:
=AVERAGE(
SMALL(OFFSET(K3,N1,0,20,1),1),SMALL(OFFSET(K3,N1,0,20,1),2),
SMALL(OFFSET(K3,N1,0,20,1),3),SMALL(OFFSET(K3,N1,0,20,1),4),
SMALL(OFFSET(K3,N1,0,20,1),5),SMALL(OFFSET(K3,N1,0,20,1),6),
SMALL(OFFSET(K3,N1,0,20,1),7),SMALL(OFFSET(K3,N1,0,20,1),8))
Find Replace: be cautious with the Find, to ensure it is unique, in my this example ",1,", to avoid changing the" ,1)"
Enjoy...

Case insensitive search and replace using ASP and Oracle database

I am interested in providing a case insensitive search and replace query in a Active server page. At present data is collected from a html form which passes the text values to a ASP page. The ASP page runs a search (select query) to find if the data is already in the Oracle database, if it isn't the ASP page runs sql (INSERT) to insert the record, if not the page returns a form indicating that the record already exists. At present we can convert the case of new records using the VB UCase() function. But can't do a insensitive search with the existing records. *The Query must be able to utilize ASP variables.
Any help would be much appreciated.
David Cheryk
null

I can't check your script right now since I'm not on Mac. I recommend you to use FindChangeByList script for CS4 instead (it works with CS3): http://forums.adobe.com/servlet/JiveServlet/download/2080627-12695/FindChangeByListCS4.zip together with Martin Fisher's: http://www.kasyan.ho.com.ua/downloads/RecordFindChange_CS3_Kas.zip
Use this script to record settings from Text and GREP tabs, then copy and paste them into FindChandgeList.txt file.
Or, optionally you can use this script: http://www.kasyan.ho.com.ua/find_change_by_queries.html.
Kasyan

Using a variable in a Powershell search and replace string

Hi
a couple of days ago I posted a question about doing a search and replace with wildcards
Search and repalce with Widcards
I got a swift and very helpful answer but now I need to build on it.
In a text file I wanted to replace all the text between two defined words. the script I got was this
$text = 'Some Server this bit of text varies Language stuff'
$text -replace '(.*Server) .+? (Language.*)','$1 it will always say this $2'
It works great but now I want to replace "it will always say this" with a variable and I can't figure out the correct grammar to make this happen.
Can anyone help??
Thanks
Alex

Here's one way:
$replace = 'it will aways say this'if ( $text -match '(.*Server) .+? (Language.*)' )
{ "{0} $Replace {1}" -f $matches[1,2] }
else { $text }
[string](0..33|%{[char][int](46+("686552495351636652556262185355647068516270555358646562655775 0645570").substring(($_*2),2))})-replace " "

GREP search and replace: numbers and commas

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