Dealing with Wildcards in Adobe InDesign

Changing hyphens in number ranges to en-dashes, a common need in typesetting, can be frustrating to perform. This is because of the way 'wildcards' work: you can find all hyphens with 'any digit' either side, but you can't use the same wildcard function to leave those digits untouched when you change the hyphen to an en-dash. This means that either you delete the digit either side of the hyphen when the en-dash is inserted or you try and use the wildcard in the 'Change to:' box and this leaves you with '^9-^9' between your digits (and still deletes those digits next to the hyphen anyway).

The solution. While the new GREP function in CS3 and CS4 seems to promise the answer, for those less technologically minded the vanilla Find/Change Text might do a better job. This article from 2002 explains how it is possible with two Find/Change operations (which can be saved for repeated use), you can stop wasting what can amount to hours of time. The principle is simple: first of all you style each hyphen with an empty character style then search for hyphens with this empty character style to replace with en-dashes.