: Indesign GREP search includes too much It is driving me crazy and I have no idea what I am doing wrong. In my document I have to autoformat some regular expressions in and including the brackets.

@Murphy569

By default, GREP is greedy: as long as there is a match to be found further on, it will grab as much as possible. Since the . does not match (by default) a hard return character, it will usually scan all the way up to the end of a paragraph. If you enable 'single line mode' using (?s), then the . wildcard will even match hard returns and so tries to select all the way up to the end of your text.

There are two possible tricks to counteract this. First off is not using the plain "match-anything" . but a negation of the end character:

[(DP|BSZ)[^]]*]


This will select any run of "not-] characters" and thus stop at the first occurrence of ], after which it will match the next character, which will always be the next ].

A more usual way, however, is to instruct GREP to use the shortest possible match, instead of the default longest possible. That is done by adding the extra modifier ? after one of the "repeat" codes ?, +, * or {x,y}. In your case, this would be

[(DP|BSZ)(.*?)]


Note that to just format the text inside square brackets, the rightmost set of round parentheses is not necessary. You can simply use

[(DP|BSZ).*?]


because the quantity modifiers only act on the immediately preceeding group ((a|b)), character class ([abc]) or (in this case) single character or single character code.

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