InDesign GREP code to add character styles to words in list separated by ;

Question

I am trying to add grep to a paragraph style so that different character styles are automatically added to some list text that is separated by ; so that each item is a different colour. In the example below 'ABC', DEFGH' etc start each item and they either end with a ; or . at the end. These are consistent throughout and will mostly start with the same set of letters, so that CS1 would apply to ABC, CS2 would apply to DEFGH, etc.

Example text:

ABC xHdisn 57 daad nsm para 10; DEFGH sacas eqdd addwqd 49 dsade para 6; IJKLMN adqdw dq wuwe para 4.

I'm fairly new to GREP. How can I make it so that eg CS1 only applies to "ABC... ;" CS2 only applies to "DEFGH... ;" etc.

Answer 1

There are probably different ways to achieve this, but here's what I came up with.

• apply CS1 to ABC.+\;
• apply CS2 to DEFGH.+\;

Answer 2

Not able to comment yet, so building on lmlmlm’s answer to include variations:

• Apply CS1 to ABC.+[.;]
• Apply CS2 to DEFGH.+[.;]

Or for tighter control, you can specify that the wildcard character not be one of your two delimiters:

• Apply CS1 to ABC[^.;][.;]
• Apply CS2 to DEFGH[^.;][.;]

Or if you want to match the “not” with the “is”,

• Apply CS1 to (ABC[^.]\.)|(ABC[^;]\;)
• Apply CS2 to (DEFGH[^.]\.)|(DEFGH[^;]\;)

Note that characters are literal (escaped) by default in character classes ([]). So while $ matches “end-of-line,” [$] matches the literal dollar sign character. (To match end-of-line within the character class, use [\$] to “unescape” it.)