GREP to find a sequence of characters without a closing apostrophe

Question

I'm trying to find long quotes in the text that I'm editing so that I can apply a different style to them. I've tried this GREP:

~[.{230}(?!.~])

What I need is for the GREP to find any 230 characters preceded by a left/opening quote mark, not including any 230-character sequence including a character followed by a right/clsoing quote mark. This should then eliminate quotes of less than 230 characters from the search. My GREP finds the correct length sequence but doesn't exclude those sequences which include a right quote mark.

So I want to find this, which my GREP does:

But not this, which my GREP also finds:

Because it has a closing quote in it and is therefore what I'm classing as a short quote.

Any ideas? TIA

Answer 1

You can match an opening ‘ followed by 230 or more occurrences of any character except an opening or closing quotation mark.

To not match the closing quotation mark, you can assert it using a positive lookahead.

‘[^‘’]{230,}(?=’)

• ‘ Match ‘
• [^‘’]{230,} Repeat 230+ times any char except ‘ or ’ using a negated character class
• (?=’) Positive lookahead, assert ’ directly to the right

See a regex demo.

Answer 2

Thanks @Thefourthbird.

So what I needed was:

‘[^’]{230,}

to search for an opening apostrophe ‘ followed by anything but a closing apostrophe [^’] of 230 characters or more {230,}

Strangely, if you use InDesign's code for left ~[ and right ]~ apostrophe it doesn't work!