GREP search for \$ Dollar sign doesn't find them all?

Question

Hello,
OK-I was practicing my GREP yesterday and was working with escaping out characters. Since the $ could not be found, I assumed it needed to be escaped out \$. The odd thing is, when I say find next, it skips many of them in the document?
Anyone know why?
thanks!
babs

Answer 1

This has been reported before; it's an oddity of ID's implementation of GREP. Nobody knows why! (*)
It only works reliably when you do not use the escape code \$ (you were, in fact, correct to try that first!), but instead use the Unicode notation for a dollar sign: \x{0024}.
I've noticed some strange GREP-related behavior myself: at times, it seems "Find Next" can skip a *huge* quantity of text and finds something near the end of the file; but a next "Find Next" mysteriously jumps back to the previous find position, and continues from there as if nothing happened.
(*) I'm pretty sure it's the Adobe engineers that are responsible for this. According to Peter Kahrel, Adobe didn't write the GREP module by themselves but chose to use a free programming library called "boost". Now boost is an extremely thorough piece of work that has gone through literally years of development and dozens, if not hundreds of programmers (probably unpaid as well, since boost is open source), and I cannot imagine something like this to slip through unnoticed.
But ... for InDesign, the Adobe programmers had to add code to cater for InDesign's own special characters and codes -- stuff like the special characters and spaces, and text variables. It's not hard to imagine a programmer accidentally changing a line of code that did the, erm, "now search for \$" stuff.