Convert text bullet (alt8) to bulleted list

[PamShoulder]

I have taken over an InDesign document with thousands of typed in bullets -  Find/change works, but I still need to do two runs. The first finds the bullet character and applies a Bull Para style and the second run removes the typed in bullet.
Is there any way to do the reverse of convert to text? i.e. Find the typed bullet character and replace it with a bulleted list?

[BobLevine]

You’ve already found it. I suppose you could script it but I’m not sure you’d save much time.

[Barb Binder · Accepted solution]

Yep, that's how I do it, too.

You could save both queries after you set them up to make it quicker next time. Or use a multi-find change plug-in to run them consecutively, but again, not that much of a time saver.

[Eugene Tyson]

In Grep

Find

^(~8\t)(.)

Change to

$2

In the formatting - select your Paragraph style for bullets.

You may need to build on this if you have sub bullets

[PamShoulder]

Thanks Eugene-but Grep still makes my head hurt!

[PamShoulder]

It didn't like the /t - I guess because the user used multiple spaces. And wouldn't do anything without the $2 - but it worked like a dream - thanks again!

[Eugene Tyson]

In that case you could use

^(~8\s+?).

That would be \s+ which is any space and keep on looking - the ? means to only find it in a nest of mixed spaces.

So essentially - I'm looking for a bullet - at the start of a sentence, followed by any type of space, repeating until no more are found.

[Eugene Tyson]

Ok nothing to be too worried about

All we're saying here is

^ - start of a sentence

~8 - is a bullet

\t - is a tab

I'm asking Indesign to find a bullet from the start of a sentence that's followed by a tab

~8\t is in parentheses because we want it to be a "found" expression

So

^(~8\t) tells indesign to find the bullet followed by a tab and remember this as "found" - typically it's called "found 1"

Next I have

. - which is any character

It's in parentheses because I want this be "found" - this will be marked to be "Found 2"

In the change area

I have $2

This denotes Found 2 - whereas $1 would be Found 1

I'm asking InDesign to find the bullet followed by a tab followed by any character. But having them in parentheses lets InDesign mark them as being different "Found" items.

In the change area - I'm asking InDesign to only replace the text with $2 (found 2) which is any character after the tab

So it's finding the bullet followed by tab followed by any character

And it's replacing it with just "found 2" which is any character that appears after the tab.