Adobe Certified Expert - InDesign CS2
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Episode 55: GREP Alpha Breaks in Lists

Learn how to use GREP to describe all items in a list that begin with the same letter, then insert a space between and/or add an alphabetical heading to each alpha group. Covers GREP Find/Change, wildcard/location/found text metacharacters, character sets, marking subexpressions, and backreferences (an undocumented feature).

Watch the episode here (23:22), or you can subscribe via iTunes.


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13 Responses to “Episode 55: GREP Alpha Breaks in Lists”

  1. James Wamser says:

    Welcome back Michael.

  2. Jean-Claude Tremblay says:

    Welcome back! What a nice return with this amazing GREP tutorial.

    We missed you…

  3. Nice trick. You can match the last line without a return by moving \r to the beginning of the marking subexpression.

    ^([A-Z]).+(\r\1.+)*

    If you are a hard core regex geek you can do it all in one step using this less-than-elegant expression that ignores “The “, “A “, and “An “:

    ^(?:(?:The|An?) )?([A-Z]).+(\r(?:(?:The|An?) )?\1.+)*

  4. Maryse Bédard says:

    I am sooooo glad to see you are back!
    Thank you, thank you, thank you! 🙂

    Oh!, and welcome back! 😉

  5. Thanks. I’ve wanted to get back to this for a long time. It feels good to finally be doing the podcast again.

  6. Good to see you back! Keep em coming! 🙂

  7. Probably the best video podcast on the planet.

    Everyone in the world should watch these to see how they are done the right way. =)

  8. So glad to see you have returned. I agree with Lucia, “keep em coming”!

  9. Welcome back. Which is the next episode? I can´t wait for it. I love grep. Do you can make more themes with grep?

  10. I’m soooo curious about the list of Grep searches saved in your list (at 20:14)…
    Welcome back, hope to see you around more frequently, I’ve learned A LOT from your Grep advices 😉

  11. Welcome back! 🙂

  12. Great to have you back Michael – Look forward to more great movies and info. I’ve still got my copy of your CS4 InDesign Styles book by the side of my desk!

  13. I still refer to your podcast whenever teaching InDesign. My wish list has for a very long time and includes you doing more courses for Lynda.com.