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I am relatively new to scripting and within an InDesign Script I am trying to change all the first letters of all sentences to uppercase (many of the are lowercase, since I randomly generated the setences from different text sources).

I am so far able to find the text parts with this Grep expression:

\.(\s)+\l

I also found this script by Peter Kahrel, that he shares on InDesign Secrets:

app.findGrepPreferences.findWhat = "^.";
found = app.activeDocument.findGrep();
for (i = 0; i < found.length; i++)
    found[i].characters[0].changecase (ChangecaseMode.lowercase);

However, when I now replace the ^. with my own expression, and change lowercase to uppercase, the script does not work, which makes sense, since I do not want to change the first character of my findGrep results, but the last one. But how can I find the last character? The breaks between the sentences have different lengths, so I cannot simply type 2 instead of 0.

Any help would be very appreciated! Thank you!

Edit: I'm working on CS6.

Cyrus
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mdomino
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1 Answers1

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Your GREP returns matches that start with a period, then have any number of spaces (including hard returns, probably), and always end with one lowercase character. So far, so good. You can access the last character (and in fact any last item in any InDesign object collection) in this way:

found[i].characters[-1].changecase (ChangecaseMode.lowercase);

which 'indexes' from the end, rather than from the start.

However! The only character in your matches, other than the period and spaces, is always going to be a lowercase letter. So you can skip the entire "how to find the correct index" thing, and probably slightly speed up the script as well, by simply applying lowercase (or, as you are using it, uppercase) to the entire match:

found[i].changecase (ChangecaseMode.lowercase);

because nothing will happen to not-lowercaseable characters (a word I declare to signify "having the Unicode-defined property of being lowercase and having an uppercase equivalent). (Or the other way around, if I understand your purpose correct.)

Jongware
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