How can I use GREP to find all text between bullet and equals sign in bullet list in InDesign?

Question

I have a bulleted list with several entries, it's a list of keyboard shortcuts, similar to the text below:

• alt+shift+ctrl+2 = Lock Others
• alt+shift+ctrl+3 = Hide Others
• alt+ctrl+b = Blend

I want to select all the text between the bullet and the equals symbol, no matter how many characters. Thought this:

(?<=•).+?(?=\=)

would work, but no luck.

Answer 1

Well, non of the above seemed to work, likely due to how InDesign does bullets, but this

^(.*)(?=\=)

seemed to work for what I needed. Thanks for helping though!

Answer 2

If you used e.g. a hyphen as the bullet, the expression would probably match as you desire. The bullet is a unicode (hex U+2022) or Ansi (149; hex 95), so try replacing the bullet glyph with \x{95} in your regular expression.

EDIT:

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/indesign/cs/using/WSFB3603CC-8D84-48d8-9F77-F3E0644CB0B6a.html

I see that the bullet is ~8 when working with regular expressions.

Answer 3

If you use tabs for the spaces, this would work:

\t(\s|.*)\t

It would include the first tab, followed by all characters until the next tab.

Answer 4

.+\= this expression will select all text from the beginning of a line of text up to the equal sign Then set a character style to format the text as required. If the Bullets uses a Paragraph Style independent of other text in the document and the bullets are in the style then set a Character Style for the bullet point, This means the text formatted with GREP and the bullet can have different character styles