Time formatting with GREP

[r5dsign]

Hello Community,

I am trying to use GREP to format the times for  events in a program I am designing. I got it started but for some reason but it is not catching the rest of the time patterns. See attached screenshot. I know I still have to account for the rest of the patterns but this is where I need expert advise on how to do it so that numbers, colons ( : ), dashes ( - ), and morning ( am ) are accounted for.

Here's my initial attempt: \d+\[a|p(m)]?

Thank you in advance.

[Jongware · Accepted solution]

This is what you have now:

d+\[a|p(m)]?

That is, EITHER one or more digits, followed by a literal(!) open bracket and an 'a', OR a 'p' followed by an 'm' followed by an optional closing bracket.

What you want is more something like this (untested!):

( \d+(:\d+)?[pa]m-?)+

which is

  a group of

    some digits, optionally followed by

       a colon and more digits

    followed by either a 'p' or an 'a'

    followed by an 'm'

    optionally followed by a hyphen

  repeated ad infinitum

The optional hyphen at the end is to cater for "9am-10am", which would be a time, followed by that optional hyphen, then followed once more by the entire oattern but without the hyphen. You can see this if you accidentally entered "9am-10am-" somewhere; the hyphen at the end will also be included.

[Erica Gamet]

I assume you want everything formatted then, including the hyphen? If so, Jongware's solution is dead on (tested!)...no surprise there!
I used his expression on the following:

9am-5pm

8:30pm-10pm

7:25am-11:30am

It worked beautifully.

[r5dsign]

Beautifully answered!

At first I thought I was doing something wrong when I tried Jongware's solution but I didn't realize there was an extra space between the first opening parenthesis and the first backward slash that I needed to remove.

Thank you Adobe community for your input!!