Not real clear on exactly what you want to have happen.

Just guessing, but if you put this in the Find What field …

(tag)(.)

… and replace where it says tag with the actual tag (if they used square brackets [Block] you'll need to escape from them with backslashes … \[Block\])

Put $2 in the Change To field …

… and then your Block Quote style in the Change Format field.

It'll look for your Tag and the next character following it and then replace them both with the following character only and bring in the style with it.

Or maybe you had a different question.

Hi Ariel,

There isn't any sample text coming through at all.

Try this in the Find Field:

(<TAG>)(.+\r*.*\r*.*\r*.*)(<\\TAG>)

So that's three sub-expressions.

1. The first one will find the opening tag;
2. the second one will find any character one or more times, followed by a return zero or more times, followed by any character zero or more times (and again two more times — that's 4 paragraphs worth, add more \r*.* sections as needed);
3. the third one will find the closing tag.

And $2 in the change field will replace all of it with just the content of the second string. Change format to the style you want.

Much tidier but you need to use a close tag in the last sub-expression.

Arïel wrote:

 

I played around with multiline mode (?m). That seemed more intuitive to

me but it didn't work. In the end I found a slightly different solution

to yours. I can't say I really understand what single line and multi

line modes do...

Single line mode (?s) changes the behavior of the . (period) operator. By default it's disabled and does not match a hard return, so the expression

.+

will always stop matching right before the next hard return. Enabling single line mode will essentially make your text one full long line, as far as the . wildcard is concerned.

You typically need this modifier if you want to grab a match over multiple paragraphs.

Multiple line mode (?m) changes the behavior of the ^ and $ anchor points. By default it is enabled and matches the start and end of a paragraph (right after and before a hard return). Disabling will make ^ and $ only match the very start and the very end of an entire story (the largest single unit of consecutive text in InDesign).

This sounds weird because it seems like the default mode is "normal", and therefore there would be no use to be able to disable this flag. However, originally GREP was designed for simple text line processing, inside of which you'd never would find a hard return. When support for hard returns as 'end of paragraph' got added, GREP needed a modifier to discern between start-of-text and start-of-new-paragraph.

InDesign supports \A and \Z for start and end of story, so you don't need to change this flag, but you get it for free anyway because it's built in into the standard GREP library that Adobe used.