InDesign GREP: Unexpected behavior with OR operato… – Adobe Product Community

> Peter Kahrel’s “GREP in InDesign” book notably omits any discussion of the OR operator

Well, that’s not entirely true, there is discussion with examples in various places, and there is a section on alternatives, but it’s true that you wouldn’t find anything on the OR operator by looking at the table of contents. So that should have been clearer, thank you for the comment. But I wasn’t aware of the problems with anchors and therefore there’s no mention of them.

What you describe is clearly a bug. Did you report it (at indesign.uservoice.com)? If you did (or will do, please post the link here so that we can vote for it.

These days I don’t think you can speak of ‘standard regex’. Various versions have come about over the years — see e.g. www.regular-expressions.info/tools.html and Friedl’s (ageing) Mastering Regular Expressions. InDesign uses Boost’s regex libraries, which are widely used. It’s therefore not correct to say that InDesign uses a simplified regex engine. Adobe made errors integrating the Boost libraries, that’s the problem.