Re: Help with find text command
Re: Help with find text command
- Subject: Re: Help with find text command
- From: Emmanuel <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2007 20:48:40 +0200
At 12:32 PM -0500 8/1/07, Wallace, William wrote:
I'm using the find text command from satimage.osax to search a block of text
to find a string that fits a pattern defined as a regular expression. I have
the basic regexp working but I'm looking to refine it a little and, being a
regexp newb, I'm wondering if what I want to do is even possible. The
string(s) I'm looking for are in the following format:
[1-5 digits][hyphen][1-7 digits][hyphen][1-7 digits][hyphen][1 digit (which
may actually be an "X")]
This is the command that I have so far to match this:
--
find text
"[[:digit:]]{1,5}-[[:digit:]]{1,7}-[[:digit:]]{1,7}-[[:digit:]X]{1}" in
theText with regexp and all occurrences
--
Seems to work fine up to a point. However, it occurred to me that the regexp
could match this string: "0-0-0-0". Which is not at all what I want. I'm
looking for 10 digit ISBNs in the block of text (which should always be 13
characters--10 digits divided into 4 substrings by 3 hyphens). Is there a
way that I can maintain the flexibility in the number of digits within each
substring, but insist that the total number of characters in the matched
string remain constant at 13?
I suppose I could just check the length of each match and ignore those
matches that don't fit the bill, but we're talking about hundreds of ISBNs
in dozens of InDesign layouts and I'd prefer, for the sake of speed, to
filter out the red herrings to begin with.
To filter the red herrings, maybe a permissive regexp which would
only insist on the number of characters would be enough? Like:
[[:digit:]X-]{13}
(note that the hyphen must be last in the brackets)
Emmanuel
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