Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 25177
Regular expressions in find and replace many combinations not available
Last modified: 2013-08-07 14:41:21 UTC
In find and replace the following combinations of regular expressions are not possible paragraph (enter), line-break (shift-enter), page-break (ctrl-enter), tab. For instance I want to replace tab, tab with page-break paragraph with line-break all combinations must be possible as in other word-processing programs
reassigned to bh
*** Issue 27643 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Hear, hear! It seems a little under par to have a search function that can't find, and regular expressions that are not very regular (see duped Issue 27643 about '\n')...
Combining regular expressions and formatted text is not always simple. I think there may be too much "intelegence" in the current F&R. for example it will automatically add spaces where it THINKS there should be one. It would be more powerful if it only does what you ask. I often use F&R in reformatting code in programming ignoring spaces etc at the beginning of sentences or paragraphs makes cleaning code very difficult!
*** Issue 35210 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Looking over at Issue 35210, I noticed that regex searching for "Peter$" will find just the string "Peter" when it's at the end of a paragraph, and will *not* include the paragraph mark itself, as stated. What's confusing is that regex searching for "$" alone *will* find empty paragraphs, and *will* select the paragraph mark, which seems to go against what the help files say. This behavioral inconsistency is rather puzzling. I'm using Beta 1, build 1.9.118.
The find and replace expression I use most in Word is replace ^p by ^l which means replace a paragraph break by a line break. Why? Because when I paste over text from some other application, it's pasted with page reaks at the end, and I like to have line breaks. That this shall not be possible in OpenOffice is bad. I use OOo 2.0 and this bug still exists. Whether this is fixed in Regular Expression F&R or otherwise in F&R I don't really care, but an enhancement to F&R is strongly needed.
Very disappointed to see that this problem hasn't been addressed in OOo 2.0! Incomprehensible, considering how much :-| 2.0 resembles MS Office in other ways, both in functionality and look-&-feel. I have some friends as well as customers who I have converted over to OO Writer from MS Word, and I have to take a bad wrap on this. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE clean this up! (I was hoping for a vi-like solution: using \n for new lines and \N for paragraphs. Whatever: keep it simple!)
To my disdaine, I still have to open MS Word to do effective "Find & Replace". The regular expressions just doesn't provide simple formatting tag replacement. I sedom use it any more, but Word even has a more "drop-down" button where you can select an item (eg. non-breaking space, section break) and it will insert the correct coe (in our OOo case "regular expression"). Regular Expressions DO have the potential to be VERY powerful, but it has overlooked the simple searches that most people will use. That reduces it and people no longer apprecate the possibilities. Please this needs to be addressed ASAP! OOo 2.0.3?
SBA: See also issue 15666. Note: Since that one has the keywords "ms_interoperability, oooqa, rfe_eval_ok, usability" set, I will close this one as a duplicate. *** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 15666 ***
SBA: Closed.