Resources

InDesign uses the Boost libraries for GREP; information on those libraries is available from http://www.boost.org, though the documentation there is a bit sparse.

The best resource for regular expressions is Jeffrey E.F. Friedl's Mastering Regular Expressions (O'Reilly). There is a wealth of examples there with detailed technical discussion about performance issues. Friedl also provides interesting background and historical notes. Despite the high level of technicality here and there, the book is very readable, especially the first few introductory chapters. The undocumented features I describe in this Short Cut are all due to Friedl's work: I simply tried all kinds of things he mentions to see if they worked in InDesign.

A good general introduction to regular expressions, complete with turorials, is http://www.regular-expressions.info/. Apart from these resources there are several InDesign user-to-user forums that you can turn to for information, and detailed queries in search engines may lead you to the solution of many problems.

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