Shell Programming and Scripting

can you post your sample strings? and your testing?

Sure thing. I used screenshots because it seemed the easiest way to illustrate what's going on.

Here is the original text, with a GREP string of nothing.


I first tried a basic command - Italics on the string "you":

That worked fine.

I then attempted to put italics on every word:

That worked as well.

My next attempt was to put italics on every word that began with * and ended with *:

That one failed.

Thinking perhaps the problem might be with the "word" syntax (\< and \>), I tried simply checking for a space, an asterisk, any string, another asterisk, and another space:

This almost worked, but for some reason "How about" is italicized.

Hope that helps.

try enter this string

Code:

"^\*.*\*$"

I did - here's the result:



Wouldn't that look for whole lines that begin and end with asterisks, rather than individual words?

yeah it seems so

Code:

\<.*\>

your code seems to have an effect to the entire paragraph. I am now not sure if you can remove them.

Found it.

Apparently, punctuation isn't treated as part of a word, so it threw off the \< and \> tags. Instead, I've done this:

Code:

(\*)(\w+)[[:punct:]]*(\*)

asterisk, one or more words, possible punctuation marks, and a final asterisk.

Thanks for the help.