GREP InDesign, can I move a word to the beginning of a paragraph?

Question

Is there a way to move an entire specific word at the beginning of the sentence it belongs to? Let's say I want words contained within brackets to be repositioned.

At the moment I have something like this:

• WordOne wordtwo wordthree wordsfour [targetWord] otherWord otherword.

I would like it to become:

• [targetWord] WordOne wordtwo wordthree wordsfour otherWord otherword.

I know how to identify the word within brackets, but I was wondering if there is a way to move it.

Answer 1

You can achieve this with a "marking subexpression", which are just () parenthesis where each set can be referenced later with $#.

So the below GREP finds three groups of characters, then rearranges them:

• GREP Find: (.+ )(\[.+\])\s?(.*)

• GREP Replace: $2 $1$3

The 1st group finds anything up to the bracketed text, the 2nd is your bracketed text, and the 3rd is any optional remaining text.