Find and replace

owenkc · Pure-blooded Human Joined: Sep 02, 2004 Posts: 31

I'm hoping someone here will be able to help me get rid of MS Office from my machine.

Just about the only reason I keep it is that I can do the following in Word, but not in NeoOffice (and I have the latest version, with patches)

Find two successive newlines
Replace them with tab
Find all other newlines
Replace them with space
Find all tabs
Replace them with two successive newlines.

Please don't bother to just tell me to look at regular expressions in the Help file. I've spent hours trying just about everything I can find in there with no luck. I've asked the OpenOffice support forum and that is all they can come up with. I'm looking for specific advice, here

Is this possible in NeoOffice or is there something Word can do that NeoOffice/OpenOffice can't?

Cheers,

Dave

Luke · Posted: Mon May 23, 2005 6:38 pm Post subject:

Hi,
What I think you want to do can be accomplished by:-

{Regular expressions on. You don't type any quote marks, but I need them so I can show a " "}

Search for "^$"
[This is a specific code for a blank paragraph]

Replace with "\t"

Find all/replace all

-----------------------

Search for"$"

Replace with " "

Find all/replace all

-------------------------

Search for "\t"

Replace with "\n\n"

Find all/replace all

Close find box.

This is much harder to do than it should be, and requiring different codes in the replace box from those in the find box is so unintuitive I'd call it a bug...... but it is OOo's bug, and we're stuck with it Sad

The official OOo way of fixing hard-wrapped text is via autoformat, but it tries to be too clever, and won't take out an unwanted newline if it coincides with the end of a sentence.

Luke

sardisson · Town Crier Joined: Feb 01, 2004 Posts: 4588

Luke, you seem by far to be the resident expert on Find and Replace. When you get a chance, would you mind filling in "Find and Replace" article in the wiki a little bit?

http://neowiki.sixthcrusade.com/index.php/Using_Find_and_Replace

It doesn't need to be too detailed, but what's up there is pretty sparse because I don't understand much of these discussions Smile

Thanks,
Smokey

Luke · Posted: Tue May 24, 2005 5:21 pm Post subject:

Hi,
I certainly would not claim expertise here - I had no idea what the answer (if it is the right answer) to owenkc's question was until just before I posted it.

I've taken the last couple of find and replace queries as they are well defined problems, susceptible to solution by setting up a test document and playing with the options suggested in the online help until it works as required. If this results in some useful information for the community, and saves Ed/Patrick a few minutes, I'm happy.

I've made a start on the wiki entry as requested.

Luke

PS Your wiki link shows as underlined, but "wiki entry" above is the same link, but it is not underlined. Looking back through a few old posts, I see some links underlined, others not. Weird. See http://trinity.neooffice.org/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=995&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=90 for another page with mixed link styles.

sardisson · Town Crier Joined: Feb 01, 2004 Posts: 4588

OPENSTEP · Posted: Tue May 24, 2005 8:59 pm Post subject:

If you're seeing issues, please file them along with your browser and browser version in the following topic in fzkd servers:

http://trinity.neooffice.org/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=1413

I only smoke tested them in Safari 2.0 and IE 5.2.3 *gag*.

ed

ovvldc · Posted: Tue May 24, 2005 10:16 pm Post subject: