GREP styles help needed!

I want to make an email address italic in a paragraph using grep styles.
Each email is different, so i want want to identify each email by the @ sign. How do I make the whole email address change to the required style when each one has a different name?
Any help appreciated.

The basics are pretty easy to grasp:
\<\w[-\w_\.]+\w@\w[-_\w\.]+\w\>
will mark all 'word characters' (a-z, digits), at-sign, word characters again. Some email addresses may contain "weird" (not really standard) characters -- just add these inbetween the square brackets. I added the hyphen and the underscore as examples. (Additionally, the hyphen is "special" inside square brackets, meant for a range, as in "a-z". Always insert it first to remove this magical property!)
Notice the word delimiters \< and \> left and right, forcing all to be one single entry; if you see an entire email address that does not appear marked, it must contain some 'invalid' character.

Similar Messages

Creating a GREP style Help Needed

I would like to set-up a style using GREP expression(s) that would do the following:
Everything preceding an em dash (including the em dash and two spaces after the em dash) would be set to bold-italic, AND everything in the paragraph that begins with the word "NOTE:" until the end of the paragraph would be regular-italic.
Here is a sample of the kind of text I want to format with one style:
OPERATOR PANEL - The operator panel is located on the right-hand electrical enclosure. NOTE: Not all equipment will have the same operator panel. Refer to schematics for additional information.
"OPERATOR PANEL - " would be all bold (or bold italic). The body text is regular. the "NOTE: Not all .... " to the end would be regular-italic.
Any help or direction to a web-site with examples would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
RPP

It's easier than you think.
Peter's suggestion of a regular nesting style might work, except that it's
i always
applied to each paragraph you apply it to. That's just what the Grep styles are for:
i conditional
stuff.
The 1st half: Apply Style: Bolded To Text: ^.*? ~=
(there should be another space after the '=')
The 2nd half: Apply Style: Italicized To Text: NOTE:.*$
These are both pretty much basic GREP expressions -- except for the "~=", that's Adobe's --, so just about any google to a GREP repository can explain them. I already knew the basics, but
this page taught me some new tricks.

Grep Style Help

Hi!
I need a grep style for this one:
I got a list of style names. I need to put SIZE: in the beginning of all the styles names, what is the grep style for that?
THANKS!

It does'nt work. I got at list with style names in a tabel.
Like this:
ELECTRA
PAPRIKA
PERNILLE
THELMA
and so on..
I need to put SIZE: in front of every name.
SIZE: ELECTRA
SIZE: PAPRIKA
SIZE: PERNILLE
SIZE: THELMA

GREP/nested styles: Help needed

Hi there,
I loved GREP and nested styles from the moment I figured out what it was. But sadly I am not very good at building structures, and I can't find a GREP manual for my needs (I'd need it in German). So my skills are very, very basic, but usually I get along. Now I have a task that goes far beyond, and after one and a half very frustrating days of testing and fiddling around I figure that am stuck. I hope that anyone can help.
So this is the task: I have an Excel file, 11 columns and hundreds of lines. Those will have to go in a "list of publications" of a scientific book.
The columns are tabstop separated:
Author1 Author2 Author3 Author4 Author5 Text Title Journal Volume Page Year
The result will have to look like this:
Author1, Author2, Author3, Author4, and Author5, Text,
Title
Journal <blank> Volume, Page <blank> (Year)
So I have to insert commas, the word "and", (probably soft) linebreaks, blanks, and brackets. "Title" needs to be in italics, while "Volume" needs to be bold. The problem is that I get text corrections all the time, and the excel file gets longer and longer every day. In addition to that, some columns, like "Author4" and "Author5", and mostly "Text" are often, but not always, empty.
Is there a way to change the tabstop separated Excel lines into what it has to look like more or less automatically (or at least in just a few simple steps)?
Thanks for your help!
Best from a sunny Hannover, Germany,
Gero

I'd have saved the excel file as a Comma Delimited File
Then all your text would be converted from
Author 1
Author2
Author3
Author4
Title etc.
to
Author1, Author 2, Author3, Author4, Title etc.
Then it would have been a matter of finding a determined amount of commas to a point and inserting a soft return
and so on.
If that makes sense?

TabBar Style Help needed

Hi,
I'm trying to figure out how to style a tab bar such that the
selected tab will have text of a different color than the
unselected tabs.
Imagine 4 tabs. 3 are very light gray with black text. 1 is
selected and it is dark blue with white text.
I've been all over the documentation and I just can't figure
out how to do this.
Here's what I tried that didn't work:
.myTabs {
tabHeight:30;
tabStyleName: "myTab";
.myTab {
fillAlphas:1,1;
fillColors:#F1F1F1,#FAFAFA;
textSelectedColor:#FFFFFF;
color:#000000;
borderColor: #A7A7A7;
backgroundColor: #6B86B6;
cornerRadius: 0;
I thought using the textSelectedColor property would give me
what I needed, but it didn't. Please help.
Thanks,
--Jon

Here is a really good resource for style questions. The Flex
3 Style Explorer...see the changes and code in real-time.
See
it here

Dreamweaver Template/Styles help needed

Go SBI!!! My first site is ranked #9 on google and #14 on
Yahoo!!!
Okay, hello everyone, I could use some help. I'm stuck after
lots of attempts. I am working on a new website using Dreamweaver.
I have read most of 1,100-page DW Bible, but reading and
implementing properly are two different things.
I have 90% of my template file done. It has a header and
footer and inbetween the content will site between two side colums
(the left side will contain the nav bar and the right sidde misc
info). My issue is in getting the three sections (left-column,
center content, right-column) to have the same height so the
bottoms line up.
The issue is that each page varies in length based on the
amount of content. Absolute seems to work, but I must be able to
edit it from within each page individually. Here is the difficulty
I'm having.
I'm trying to setup my main page as a template so changes to
items like the navbar get updated automatically throughout the
webpages. Since the navbar sits within the left column (which
contains CSS style codes such as border width, float, etc.) and
I've gone in and chosen an editable area within that column, it
makes everything else uneditable (like you'd want for a template
page).
But it also makes it impossible to edit that one height
property. My main goal is to have the left center and right areas
all lined up at the bottom and to be able to make changes to the
master navbar and have it change all pages.
Should I be looking to accomplish this another way?

> My issue is in getting the three
> sections (left-column, center content, right-column) to
have the same
> height so
> the bottoms line up.
There is no non-javascript way to do this. Google "faux
columns" for a nice
workaround.
> like you'd want for a template page
I'm worried that you don't quite understand how templates
work when you say
this. It's on the child pages where you want the navigation
to be
uneditable.
> Should I be looking to accomplish this another way?
Yes. Try the Google search.
Murray --- ICQ 71997575
Adobe Community Expert
(If you *MUST* email me, don't LAUGH when you do so!)
==================
http://www.projectseven.com/go
- DW FAQs, Tutorials & Resources
http://www.dwfaq.com - DW FAQs,
Tutorials & Resources
==================
"svteclipse" <[email protected]> wrote in
message
news:[email protected]...
> Go SBI!!! My first site is ranked #9 on google and #14
on Yahoo!!!
>
> Okay, hello everyone, I could use some help. I'm stuck
after lots of
> attempts.
> I am working on a new website using Dreamweaver. I have
read most of
> 1,100-page
> DW Bible, but reading and implementing properly are two
different things.
>
> I have 90% of my template file done. It has a header and
footer and
> inbetween
> the content will site between two side colums (the left
side will contain
> the
> nav bar and the right sidde misc info). My issue is in
getting the three
> sections (left-column, center content, right-column) to
have the same
> height so
> the bottoms line up.
>
> The issue is that each page varies in length based on
the amount of
> content.
> Absolute seems to work, but I must be able to edit it
from within each
> page
> individually. Here is the difficulty I'm having.
>
> I'm trying to setup my main page as a template so
changes to items like
> the
> navbar get updated automatically throughout the
webpages. Since the navbar
> sits
> within the left column (which contains CSS style codes
such as border
> width,
> float, etc.) and I've gone in and chosen an editable
area within that
> column,
> it makes everything else uneditable (like you'd want for
a template page).
>
> But it also makes it impossible to edit that one height
property. My main
> goal
> is to have the left center and right areas all lined up
at the bottom and
> to be
> able to make changes to the master navbar and have it
change all pages.
>
> Should I be looking to accomplish this another way?
>
>

Help Needed, (Stuck on quotation styles)

Hi!
It might be a really easy question to answer, never the less:
I have inDesign CS4, and I writing a document, where I have alot of quotes.
All I want is to automaticly select the quotes, and change them to bold font style.
Only think I found that culd work is nested Styles, but I don't have a cluewhat order or what to put.
Can anyone help please?

What you want is a paragraph style for quotes that has the formatting you want. Whether this requires a nested style, a GREP style, or nothing special, depends on what thes paragraphs look like. Are the quotes self-contained paragraphs, or embedded in other text? If embedded, is there only one quote or can there be more? Are quotes always surrounded by quotation marks?
We need complete details about waht the text looks like before we can offer good advice. A screen capture showing the desired result would be a big help. You can use the camera icon on the web page to embed an image in a post like this:

Help Needed - FusionFx Style - How do I remove the Dashboard Grey Box Section, so that Dashboard Background is Blank

Help Needed - FusionFx Style - How do I remove the Dashboard Grey Box Section, so that Dashboard Background is Blank
We like FusionFx Style but would like to keep the background white like blafp style.

Can you be a little more descriptive on what you need here and explain what exactly you want to be changed.

Can somebody please help me creating a GREP style to reformat all the website adresses in my layout?

i've got this text from a client full with webadresses, some end with .com or .nl and i would like to highlight these adressess in bold and blue... i created a textstyle for it but the only thing i manage to get as a result is only the beginning of the website 'www.' i know it's possible but my skills are lacking in this departement...
can anyone help me getting started...?

Got it.
parentheses group #1 (the first | separated OR group): DOS path name, because a link can also refer to a file.
parentheses groups #2-5 (2nd OR group): e-mail address. Note: a "mailto://" prefix does not get matched here.
parentheses groups #6-13 (3rd OR group): URL, with a mandatory prefix "http://", "https://", "ftp://", and some more ("smb://", for example, is a Samba server file prefix). This also includes "ftps://", which was unknown to me but it appears it's perfectly valid.
It does not match the "mailto://" prefix for an e-mail address, but that's a moot point because the URL may not contain a @ character anyway.
This group correctly recognizes URLs that contain one or more hyphens in the base name (it also correctly rejects hyphens in the domain extension).
parentheses groups #14-15: (4th and last OR group): any non-prefixed URL, recognized solely on the basis of "any sequence of word characters, including the hyphen, followed by a period, optionally followed by some more characters (including both period and forward slash but excluding the hyphen), followed by at least two uppercase or lowercase letters.
This last one is responsible for (a) recognizing both "deadline.com" and "keefe-studios.com" as URLs, but (b) also rejecting "www.test-test.com" -- a hyphen in the 'center', fully optional, part.
Interestingly, there are more differences between the more exact 'match only with prefix' and the catch-all 'match about anything'. The former includes among the allowed characters: ':' (which, if I recall correctly, is only valid if a port number follows!), '#', '$', '%', '&', '?' and '+', so it matches a server query as well:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=enl&tbo=d&site=&source=hp&q=allowed+characters+in+url&oq=a llowed+characters+in+url
The latter does not include all of these characters, just letters, numbers, the hyphen (but not in all positions), and a period. It's probably because this is an unreliable way to match URLs after all -- hence the number of 'false hits'. These would only increase with even more allowed characters.
Lesson learned: to be assured "Create Hyperlinks Automatically" works as expected, make sure URLs are prefixed with "http://", and mail addresses are not prefixed with "mailto://". I didn't test if the function actually creates a correct e-mail link, but even if it does the prefix is not included in the clickable linked text.
(Also interestingly, it appears a GREP style, fed with this same query, doesn't stumble over the hyphen whereas a GREP find does. I don't think I'm capable of figuring that one out.)

How can I apply a GREP style to a text variable?

Hello everybody,
I have a question concerning GREP styles inside Paragraph styles.
1. I've created a text variable to generate a recurring title on the upper side of the page based on the main title paragraph style;
2. The recurring title is in Adobe Garamond Small Caps, all letters in lower case, and it is formatted with a paragraph style sheet in the master page;
3. I want to create a GREP style for the recurring title, according to which every time that in the recurring title appear an apostrophe or the double quotes, they are automatically lowered 2pt on the baseline
(I already created the character style sheet that lowers letters of 2pt).
What I need is the correct GREP formula to automatically apply the character style sheet to apostrophes and double quotes, in the line of text generated by the text variable...
Thanks for your help
p.

Hi,
As I said, using Power Headers is the best way to do it.
As Power Headers treats the header as "live text", you can use a simple grep style inserted in the header para style:
… to obtain:
For the sample, I use a char style named "-2pts" with Shift -5 pts and Green color to show you the place of ' and ".
Don't forget that, even Power Headers treats the header as "live text", you only have to update Power Headers to make an update of the headers!
Even I use in another cases Tomaxxi's [JS] and it's a good way to treat the question, Jean-Claude Tremblay's solution is less interesting because the variable used is converted in text. If the variable text content changes, it's more complicated to manage the update!

URGENT: Paragraph/Character style help (doing massive amounts manually)

I'm using CS3 at work but if it's magically easier, i may have access to cs4 (less likely but possible). It's a long post but I wanted to be in depth with my problem which at its core is simple. I have included a 2-page spread example in pdf.
What I greatly need help with is your opinion of how I can set this up to speed up the process, unify the document, and make future edits simple instead of crazy difficult. Can I configure a paragraph style to NOT replace font style? Can that style include my preset tabs (for bullets) which list as follows?:
number, small letter, roman numeral, bullet
Let me start by saying I SCOUR the net and all available options before posting. I'm cleaning up/editing a production manual for a portrait company I work for and am new to indesign but have figured many things out. I'm quite proficient with the Adobe Suite and computers. I'm using last year's indesign file and it was done very poorly. The words are right, the lines are right, the tabs are terrible and i've needed to move many pages out of order and add plenty. I also chose to disable 1 text box that flows from page to page (i see now it's helpful but they had made it impossible for me to use the existing one and I didn't have time to redo). The pictures I can add and manipulate freely but an embedded text-wrapped version would be nice as well (less important by far).
The manual is spiral bound with text on the right page and a notes page on the left for the layout. (flipped open the left side is lines for notes and the right side is operations). It's set up with a Header at the top (in some cases a sub header almost identical right below it), a space or two, then an outline format IE:
1)     Open job
          a) Go into G:\Location
          b) Select job code
               i) *Note: Be sure to select the right one (etc)..
2)      Continue
                                   |                                                    |
                                   |                                                    |
                                   |                    Picture                      |
                                   |                                                    |
                                   |______________________________|
Page size is 8.5x11 with a .5 safe print border all around (document is 11x17). The Document is about 100 pages of written directions (so double that for indesign pages). It will be printed on a Xerox IGen3. The whole book give or take is set up like that. Thus, a few paragraph and character styles are in order. I've been editing/cleaning up each page re-tabbing, re-laying out. It's hell and must be done in 2 days.
I'm using Myriad Pro universally as the font. The sizes are as follows:
Header: 16 bold center
Sub (if applicable): 15 bold center
Body: 12 point
I've gotten paragraph styles to work sort of. I tried setting up numbering and bulleting but it's been giving me so much grief that I typed those all by hand or have just adjusted existing ones (I don't have much time currently, BUT need to learn for future updates and to convert it to styles). I know styles are the way to go with a couple master pages involving bulleting and character styles... however I could not become an expert overnight unfortunately; i tried =)
The real killer for paragraph styles have been:
- The portions of the directions that pertain to specific menu options or clicks are in bold, occasional important info is red. Normal text including numbers/bullets are normal. There are many words repeated that need bold so perhaps some kind of search/replace script could help however im not positive.
- When I go to apply a paragraph style it must make all type bold or not bold. It doesn't replace the color of the text which is good.
- Having major trouble with bullets/numbers working the way i'd like.

It is unfortunate you only have two days, but you could play around with these suggestions below and see if they help more than they hender... (NOTE: SAVE A COPY OF THE DOCUMENT BEFORE YOU START MONKEYING AROUND IN CASE YOU HATE THE RESULTS!)
For starters, you could certainly do the lists via stylesheet. It would require 3 lists based on your sample. Base list 2 and 3 on list 1 or all 3 on a default List paragraph style, so that you can globally control your list formatting without having to change all 3 each time you want to apply a tweak.
List 1 would be leve 1, 1,2,3 style with indents like 3p, -1.5, 3p. Align right and don't restart numbers. If you want bold numbers, make a bold character style called List# and apply it.
List 2 would be level 2, a,b,c style with indents like 4p, -1p, 4p. Restart on level change.
List 3 would be level 3, i,ii,iii style with indents like 6.5p, -1.5p, 6.5p. Restart on level change.
Tweak as necessary to match your actual text.
Then just do a global GREP search and replace, replacing out the manual list numbers with real styles.
List 1 replace ^\t[0-9]+\t with ~- (discretionary hyphen is a nice invisible character that won't break anything) and paragraph style of list1.
List 2 replace ^\t\t[a-z].\t with ~- and paragraph style list2.
List 3 replace ^\t\t\t[ivx].\t with ~- and paragraph style list3.
The last step of list replacement would be to manually restart numbering for each new list.
As for the keywords, unless you have a complete list of what will be bold and it will always be bold, just manually style them with character styles.
Make a character style called "Keyword" and apply bold to the formatting.
Make a character style called "Keyword Important" and apply bold and red formatting.
If you know certain words are always, always the same and you have CS4, you could create a GREP style that applied Keyword character style to any words that matched.
For example, if the keywords Left, Right, Top, Bottom always were bolded at the beginning of the paragraph, you could add the GREP style that applied Keyword to ^(Top|Bottom|Left|Right).
In all likelihood you will be applying a lot of manual keywords too though, so make sure you put a keyboard shortcut on (like cmd-opt-1, 2, etc) on the Keyword and Keyword Important character styles. That way you can just fire through selecting text and whacking cmd-opt-1 where appropriate.

Attempting to create a GREP Style

I'm trying to make a GREP style for one of my paragraph styles, that will take the text from the beginning of a line until a colon and set a character style to it to bold that part.
Example:
Step 1: Take bread
Step 2: Take peanut butter
Step 3: Spread peanut butter on bread
I don't think I've been getting the syntax right. I've put ^\:~h and ^:~h into the 'to text' box, thinking this meant "Beginning of line until the character ':' and end" but neither of those have given me the results I want. Thanks in advance for the help!

Prismatus wrote:
Your response worked for me. I had tried using a wildcard before the ones I posted, but only put the . in, assuming it would cover more than just one character. I assume the +? covers all characters until the colon shows up, yes?
No, it's slightly more complicated than that (sorry!). By default, GREP is Greedy -- that means, if you use this
^.+:
GREP will think that the Any Character wildcard may be repeated as much as possible (that's the '+') before it needs to match the colon. What this means is that it will work just as you expected for
Step 1: This is a single line.
but will go out of its mind with this
Step 2: what will happen now? Well, contrary to what you were expecting, the entire line will be marked bold, all because everything up to the very last : will be matched!
The bold bits accurately shows what happens! Another example would be this:
\d+
which for a string of "123" will not match just the first digit, then the second, then the third, but all of them in a single long go. By default, GREP will grab as much as it possibly can.
Adding a question mark behind the "Repeat Me" character reverts this behavior to Non-Greedy behavior, and as such GREP will match as little as humanly possible:
\d+?
will then match just the "1" in "123".
Prismatus wrote:
I also like the be literal part, but I was wondering what you would have instead of \d if you had more than nine steps, or if you had substeps (1a, 1b, etc.).
That's just a case of adding more specifiers. To match one or more digits, you need this:
^Step \d+:
The '+', again, will allow a repetition of the "digit" code. In this case you don't have to add a question mark, because there is no way this could run out of control; first, it will only match digits, and second, these digits must be followed by a colon.
And if you may or may not have a single lowercase character following the digit (but still before the colon), you'd use the Any Lowercase Character code and the Zero or Once repetition specifier:
^Step \d+\l?:
(that's a lowercase ell.) You see the question mark meaning Something Entirely Different here? It's only a Non-Greedy marker when immediately following another repetition code, one of these
* (zero or more)
+ (once or more)
? (zero or once)
{4,8} (or any other set of numbers -- this is at least 4 and at most 8 times)
Uh, by the way, that makes this
abc??
a valid GREP. It will match "ab" or "abc", and then always select the shortest possible match of these two, which is then the "ab" one. ... Uh. I'm pretty sure this may be useful, some time in the future.

CS5 - Grep style problems

Where I work the treatment of the type is to reduce the size of all-caps, a string of numbers, or a combination of the two. For years they've been doing it by setting up a Character Style for each Paragraph Style (e.g., "Body smaller" for "Body), and then also alternate Character Styles if the text already has a Character Style applied to it ("Body Red Italic smaller" for "Body Red Italic"). You can imagine this quickly becomes a lot of styles.
So I thought with CS5 Grep styles I could set this up in the Paragraph Styles. I want the Grep style to apply a Character Style that is nothing but a Horizontal and Vertical scale of 95%.
The types of things I'm wanting Grep to find are below. But I'm only wanting to apply the style to the letters and numbers and not the punctuation.
AAA
B23
33,333
4,444,444
U.S.A.
(ABC-1)
I went at writing this a piece at time, so it is not very elegant. Here's what I have:
\d{2,}|\u{2,}|\u+\d+|\d+\u+|\d+[[:punct:]]\d+|\u+[[:punct:]]\u+|\u+[[:punct:]]\d+|\d+[[:pu nct:]]\u+
This does a pretty good job, with a couple of problems.
1) It is "catching" (applying the character style) to the first punctuation if there is a single character before it (e.g. the first piece of punctuation in 4,444,444 and U.S.A.)
2) It is not always "catching" instances where there are more than three sets of numbers/caps in an item (e.g. U.S.A., it doesn't style the "A"). I know Grep is probably just doing what I'm telling it to do, but I can't see how to fix it.
I would appreciate any help anyone could give me.
Thanks.
Tom

You can't do all this in one GREP style. The one you came up with is already difficult to read, so you can imagine what happens to its readability by the time you get it to work. Apart from that I don't think it's possible to do what you want in one expression.
So you really need to split up your task into several chunks, all of which you can then add to the same paragraph style. Your expressions may be more efficient, but they're much eaier to understand and maintain. Here goes.
The easy ones are AAA, B23, and (ABC-1), all of which are captured by this expression:
$?\u[-\u\d]+$?
U.S.A. is more tricky, and it needs to be split in two itself. The first part captures series capital+period, but not the last one:
\u(?=\.\u)
Capturing the last capital+period is interesting in that it requires a negative lookahead embedded in a positive lookahead, which I wouldn't have thought was possible, but it works:
(?<=\.)\u(?=\.(?!\u))
For the numbers you's do something similar.
Peter

GREP style as part of paragraph style

I'm wanting to create a GREP style that uses a character style. Whenever certain words (No class) appear followed by dates. Sometimes it is a single date and sometimes more than one date. For example:
No class 7/11.
No class 7/11-8/11.
What I have so far is:
No class \d+.
This works okay through the words "No class" and the first digit, but not for the whole sentence. I've tried different combinations but nothing that works correctly.
Can anyone help?

Peter,
I so much appreciate your help with this. Your explanation makes it understandable. But there is still a mystery.
The GREP for Instructor: Instructor Name works fine. The GREP for the date sentence is not working. Instead of the date sentence becoming italic, it matches the first part of the paragraph. This is what the GREP looks like:
This is what the paragraph looks like with the GREP applied:
It should look like this:
In a separate issue in another paragraph, which is a heading paragraph, I have a similar situation. The headings are bold, some headings list ages, and some list ages AND whether parental participation is required. I thought I could extrapolate from the information you've given me to fix this paragraph as well. I've tried different combinations, but so far haven't gotten it to work. The paragraph looks like this:
But it needs to look like this (bold paragraph with ages in regular,and parent requirement in italic):
The heading doesn't always have an age requirement, and doesn't always require parental participation.
The catalog is quite long, so if there is a way to fix these two types of paragraphs, it would save a ton of time.

Using GREP styles for changing characters and colors

Hello everybody,
I have a question regarding GREP styles. I wish to change each letter of an alphabet in text to a square in a different color. For example: every 'a' in the text change to a yellow ■. I thought GREP styles would be perfect for it so I went to find/change, typed in my requests and InDesign told me it has found no 'a' in my text, which isn't possible. How do I fix it? And the other thing- is it possible to change the color of ■ ? Because i couldn't find the option.
Please excuse me my incompetence, I am a new user of InDesign.
Thanks in advance for your help! : )

First off, it sounds like you want to use find/change with GREP, which is fine, rather than a GREP style, which is part of a paragraph style definition and cannot change the text in any way other than apply a character style to the found string, so would not help here.
The not finding the text makes me think you've limited the search parameters in some way, either by limiting the scope to a selection, or by including a style or format requirement in the find options, perhaps.
In order to do this, I think you are going to need to make use of the "other" category in the change dropdown and select Formatted Contents of Clipboard (which should clue you in that you need to make one of your colored squares and copy it to the clipboard before you run Find/Change). You can do this with either a plain text query or a GREP query, and there is no advantage to GREP in this case unless you want to match several different things and apply the same clipboard content to any of them.
You'll need to run a separate find/change for each colored square. It might be possible to script a chain so it runs in a single operation, but that would also require swapping the colored sqaures on the clipboard which complicates things in this case. You might want to ask over in scripting: InDesign Scripting

GREP styles help needed!

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