[Solved] Replacing paragraph mark..

[Hagar Delest]

hi,

how do you replace paragraph marks, tabs, etc.. in Open Office Writer? (in MS Word, you would type, for example, ^p for paragraph mark, but this is not working in Open Office.. how do you do this in OO pls..) thank you very much..

[acknak]

OOo uses a far more powerful (but also far more complicated, and at the same time less complete) feature:
Regular Expressions in Writer [OOo wiki]

[r4zoli]

Welcome on board,
before posting please read first, the Survival Guide, try to search on forum and you get the answers faster.

I think viewtopic.php?f=7&t=6818 this link gives answer your question, you problem using regular expression. Good tutorial on oooninja webpage.

[popeye]

Oh dear. I have the same question: can someone tell me where to look for the answer please? I am not sure I have the time or the disposition to go and research regexp to find out how to perform a simple "search and replace for paragraph marks" operation.
Word makes it easy. BBEdit makes it easy.Why should it be so difficult in OpenOffice?
Thanks.

[acknak]

There are a bunch of handy examples here: Regular expression samples [OOoNinja]

If you want specific suggestions, you'll have to tell us exactly what you're trying to do--replace paragraph marks with what? What are you trying to accomplish?

[popeye]

Thanks acknak, but I am really not a programmer and cannot understand those examples. I am a plain, boring user, trying to move away from MS Office. I didn't realise it could be so time consuming.
So I'll try to explain what I am trying to accomplish, although I assure you I have no need to consider examples when performing Search and Replace operations in all the other text editors/word processors I am familiar with (Word, BBEdit, Nisus, TextEdit, many others).
In this particular case, I wanted to reflow some text where an email program had broken off the lines at 80 characters or so. In BBEdit (for example), I know I can do that by entering \n in the search field, and whatever value I wish in the replace field (could be a space, a tab, a || or any other "marker" if I wish). So how do I accomplish this in OO Writer? Thanks.

[MrProgrammer]

Take a look at Alternative dialog Find & Replace for Writer. If the page is slow to load, try again later. They seem to be making infrastructure changes to some of the OOo pages and sometimes they aren't available.

[acknak]

Edit > Find & Replace
Search for: $
Replace with: space (or whatever)
Options/Regular expressions: ON (checked)

Click "Replace all".

Note that this is a special case. When you use "$" all alone, it is treated as the actual line break for purpose of replacement. That is not the case when you use $ along with other things in the "Search for" field. For example, you can't use "$$" to search for two consecutive line breaks.

[popeye]

Edit > Find & Replace
Search for: $
Replace with: space (or whatever)
Options/Regular expressions: ON (checked)

Click "Replace all".

Great. Thank you acknak, this is exactly what I was looking for. Appreciate your help

[popeye]

Take a look at Alternative dialog Find & Replace for Writer. If the page is slow to load, try again later. They seem to be making infrastructure changes to some of the OOo pages and sometimes they aren't available.

Thanks Mr Programmer. I'd prefer a built-in function, as in all the other "writers" I've used. Do you know whether future OO versions might include this alternative/extended search&replace funcionality?

[jameskhazar]

I've spent years avoiding learning regexp sytnax, it's serious overkill for such a simple (and often necessary) search and replace. It comes up often for me, like copying from a web page of a data table. For some reason the copy created a set of tabs and paragraph insertions that made it impossible to paste into a spread sheet. Simple to do in Word, find and replace ^t^p^t with ^t. After a half an hour's research and attempts with regex, still can't get it to work. I thought OpenOffice wanted to be on an even keel with MS Word. The lack of this one thing may force me to go back...

[mriosv]

There is an extension to do it:
Alternative searching 1.3.2 (AltSearch.oxt)
Copyright (c) 2007 Tomas BILEK
http://extensions.services.openoffice.o ... /AltSearch