Automating InDesign with Regular Expressions

3.3. Wildcards and Character Classes

[ . . . ]

Square brackets define a character class, which may be given as individual characters, a range of characters, or a combination of these. [a-z] stands for all lower-case letters; [A-Z] denotes all upper-case letters; [0-9] stands for all digits. Character classes can be combined: [A-Za-z] matches all letters; [a-z_] represents all lower-case letters and the underscore character.

[^. . . ]

Negated character class (clarified below).

.

Any character (except \n and \r).

\d

Digit character, i.e. [0-9].

\D

Non-digit character, i.e. [^0-9].

\w

Word character: upper- and lower-case letters, digits, and underscore, i.e. [A-Za-z0-9_].

\W

Anything that is not a word character.

\s

White space characters: all spaces (normal, em, en, thin, etc.), tabs, and return characters.

\S

Anything that is not a whitespace character.

Character classes are extremely useful. They can be given as individual characters or in the form of a range. For example, the regex /d[aeiou]/ matches all letters d followed by a vowel. Thus, the square brackets define just one character position, which can be either of the vowels. Ranges of characters can be given as ranges of literals, as in [a-z], and in Unicode notation. For instance, /\u0250-\u02FF/ matches all of the phonetic characters in a text.

In some script languages, regexes are implemented in such a way that the character classes [a-z] and [A-Z] and the \w wildcard include accented ...