: InDesign, Grep and Syntax Highlighting I have to make an e-book that contains code snippets. I am using GREP to select all code tags (bounded by <> — triangular brackets), and apply a

@Jennifer810

Your problem is that the multi-line item isn't one paragraph as far as InDesign is concerned. It's 5 paragraphs.

Replace the paragraph returns with forced line breaks (Shift-Enter) and it will work as expected.

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@Gail6891361

Don't try to match generic XML with regexp. It will not work in many cases, use a XML parser instead and export the result. See:


Why it's not possible to use regex to parse HTML/XML: a formal explanation in layman's terms, especially the second answer.


In any case the grep style does not allow matches over paragraph boundaries because its not a multi paragraph parser . You can circumvent this problem tough, by replacing all end of paragraphs with forced line breaks. This causes in design to consider it one line and match better. Now your regexp would work.

Then your regexp could be simplified as:

</?(.|n)*?>


As matching (.|/s|/S) is somewhat redundant as most of /s and /S is included in . although n is NOT so jsut adding that one exception makes testing easier. Regexp engines in general differ in the way they handle multiline stuff so beware problems lie this way.

WARNING: This regexp won't be really robust as it does understand nested <>. So commented code may screw up royally. Use a parser to dump the stuff as RTF, much better approach.

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