How to search and replace for special characters in LibreOffice / OpenOffice Writer

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I love LibreOffice / OpenOffice, but some tasks cannot be done in it, such as is mentioned in this question's title, to search and replace for special characters in Writer. Does anyone know how to do this?

This can be done with MS Word (for instance, searching for the paragraph mark "^p", and replace it with a tabulation "^t").

This can also be done in Notepad++ (in given example, using "\n" and "\t").

But in Writer, although there is the option "regular expressions", I cannot search for special characters with it – I always have to copy+paste text to MS Word/Notepad++, do what I want and copy+paste back to Writer…

Edit #1:
for the tabulation mark it works when searching for \t.

What about with paragraph marks or line breaks? It does not seem to . I've already tried \r, \n, \r\n, \n\r, ^p, ^l…

Edit #2: Almost solved by @Linker3000, but what about paragraph marks?

Best Answer

You can certainly use regular expressions in LibreOffice 3.4 as I have just tried it:

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There's a fuller list of what can and can't be used here:

http://help.libreoffice.org/Common/List_of_Regular_Expressions

Edit: There's some comments on how to deal with paragraph marks here:

http://www.oooninja.com/2007/12/example-regular-expressions-for-writer.html

Related Solutions

How to search and replace page breaks in Libre Office

Quite a hack, but I'd suggest unzipping the .odt file and working with raw XML. The content.xml seems to be the correct file to edit.

I have prepared a test file with content:

QQQQQ
-page break-
AAAAA

And here is the relevant part of the raw XML:

<!---*lots* of declarations--->
<office:automatic-styles>
    <style:style style:name="P1" style:family="paragraph" style:parent-style-name="Standard">
        <style:paragraph-properties fo:break-before="page"/>
    </style:style>
</office:automatic-styles>
<office:body>
    <office:text text:use-soft-page-breaks="true">
        <text:sequence-decls>
            <text:sequence-decl text:display-outline-level="0" text:name="Illustration"/>
            <text:sequence-decl text:display-outline-level="0" text:name="Table"/>
            <text:sequence-decl text:display-outline-level="0" text:name="Text"/>
            <text:sequence-decl text:display-outline-level="0" text:name="Drawing"/>
        </text:sequence-decls>
        <text:p text:style-name="Standard">QQQQQ</text:p>
        <text:p text:style-name="P1">AAAAA</text:p>
    </office:text>
</office:body>
<!---some happy-end--->

(The real file will proably be more complex.) It seems to me that "P1" is a style created to "bear" the property of page-breaking before the paragraph. So two things come into my mind:

remove "P1" from <text:p /> tags
remove the page-breaking property from "P1" style

By the way, here I'd also recommend avoiding regexes in favor of some real XML parser.

Automatically removing linebreaks in LibreOffice Writer

In the Edit > Find and Replace dialog, tick "Use regular expressions", put "\n" in the 'search for' box, nothing in the replace with box, click Replace all. This removes line breaks that you can insert with Shift+Enter (manual line breaks). Here's a link to LibreOffice documentation on regular expressions.
LibreOffice Writer can't replace paragraph breaks by default. Use the AltSearch add-on for OpenOffice, as it also works with LibreOffice.
To do the paste-and-remove-linebreaks automatically, you can try recording a macro (help.libreoffice.org/Common/Macro), just paste and perform the replace and have LibreOffice record them in a macro.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to search and replace page breaks in Libre Office

Automatically removing linebreaks in LibreOffice Writer

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