Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

I have been working on some coding for hundreds of files in relation to towns and cities in my state. There are many towns that sit on a county border, and therefore, show up multiple times. I need to find all of these so that I can change them slightly as to not cause conflicts in the files. The program I have been using has no feature to find duplicated words, and while doing some research, I found that OpenOffice Writer has a feature: paste the entire file into Writer, use Find and Replace, search for \b(\w+)\s+\1\b enable "Regular Expression" in "More Options" and Find All. After reading that, I went to download the entire OpenOffice package for that one feature. When I try to use it, "Search key not found"!
I even made a new document and wrote "The The" and tried searching. "Search key not found"!
Every thread I have seen on this states to use this same search phrase. They are also from before 2010. This no longer works, so how do we find duplicate words? I have also found a solution to use the spreadsheets to go through a long process of formulas to remove the duplicates, but this will not help. I do not want to remove them, I want to find them so that I can change them slightly.

Try "Find All"

It would help to know what program the data came from and what language they are in.

The pattern you mentioned works fine for me.

Steps to test it:

Start OpenOffice. Make sure that you have the current version (4.1.3; see Help > About ...)
File > New > Text Document
Type: dt
Press F3 to get a "dummy text" paragraph.
Duplicate some word in the paragraph, say ... He heard quiet quiet steps behind him.

Edit > Find & Replace
Search for: \b(\w+)\s+\1\b
Replace with:
Options/Regular expressions: ON

Click Find or Find All

If that does not work, then something's wrong with your install/setup, or you've missed a step somewhere.

If that works but your document does not, then your document may contain characters that don't match the pattern. You can try relaxing it a bit with something like this: \b(\w+)(\W+\1\b)+
If you try that, make sure to set Match case: ON

That pattern will match one or more "non-word" characters between the duplicates.

If none of that helps, then maybe you can create a small sample document with a bit of the text you're working with and attach that here.