GREP Search to apply superscript

Question

Hi there,
I'm a longtime InDesign user but I'm pretty new to GREP.
Currently I'm working on a French document, but this could easily apply to English documents as well.
I'm trying to use GREP to identify and apply superscript to letters that come after numerals indicating their position (i.e., 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.)
The code that I've written that I "hoped" would do this is:
(?<=\s\d+)[\l\u]+(?=\s)
What I hoped this query would do is:
1 - positive look behind for a white space followed by one or more numbers (?<=\s\d+)
2 - find any one or more letter characters [\l\u]+
3 - positive look ahead for a white space
A sample bit of text that I'm trying this on includes the following text:
...dans le cadre du 40e anniversaire...
My hope was that this would select the "e" which I could then apply superscript to. I can get parts of the code to work individually but I can't get the full query to work.
If anyone can point me in the right direction to get this working I would really appreciate it.
Thanks in advance!
Troy

Answer 1

Remind me again, what letters get superscripted after a number in French?
You can use something like this:
((?<=\b\d)|(?<=\b\d\d))e\b
which will pick up "4e" and "40e" -- add more digits in the first OR group, more (single) characters can be added in a character set [like this] instead of just 'e'.
WhatTheGrep's breakdown:
(  Begin Group #1
          (?<=  Lookbehind Group
                    \b  Word boundary
                    \d  Any digit (0..9)
          )  End Lookbehind Group
          |  Match previous part OR next part inside Group #1
          (?<=  Lookbehind Group
                    \b  Word boundary
                    \d  Any digit (0..9)
                    \d  Any digit (0..9)
          )  End Lookbehind Group
)  End Group #1
e  Literal character “e”
\b  Word boundary
 (1 (?<=< \b \d <) |1 (?<=< \b \d \d <) 1) e \b