[Solved] Find and replace with wildcard

[dgsarnow]

I am using OO 3.0 in vista.

I have a calc spreadsheet with a number of cells that look like this: blahblahblah(yadayadayada)

I want to remove all the blahblahs and the first parentheses. In excel I would have done a find an replace and entered *( in find and set replace to nothing. How do I do this in calc. When I try, I get told it could not find the search key.

Please help.

Cheers,

Dave

[TheGurkha]

You need to use the regular expressions, I think.

See the results of this search for threads that mention regular expressions within them. Reg Exps.

(Look at the ones iwth [Solved] in the title first )

[king_026]

Regular expressions will work. Here is a good like describing them in open office http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wik ... 7Bm.2Cn.7D. The regular expression you are going to want is .*\( which looks complicated but I'll explain it. The period means match any single character, the * means match zero or more of the preceding character (any character because of the period), .* replaces * in your Excel expression. The parentheses is a special character in regular expressions so to get it to search for the literal ( you need to put a backslash before it. Remember you have to click "more options" and the regular expressions check box in the find and replace dialogue box to use regular expressions.