Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 10160
Find & Replace: Add MS style pattern matching
Last modified: 2013-08-07 14:44:35 UTC
This one is not for me. I have a Unix background and love regexps. (Just hurry up and implement them and make sure they are not half baked like StarOffice 5.2's.) I have noticed on the newsgroups many people not being able to use the regexps to do simple pattern matching, in particyular the beginning/end of line for a paragraph marker. I have never use an M$ product but understand the patten matching is more like file name globbing. If this is what the customers are used to and want can you add such an option? But what ever don't replace/corrupt the regexps patten matching, add another check box option next to the regexps - and hurry up with the regexps and make then "proper"!
Reassigned to BH
Set to "NEW"
*** Issue 57419 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
I simply cannot believe that one STILL cannot do an easy find/replace on things like paragraphs marks. In MSWord it's ^p for an end-of-paragraph or for two in a row: ^p^p. Have you seen the numerous angry threads on this topic in the open office forum? This is a deal breaker for many people. It should be given higher status. The find and replace in Writer is ridiculously difficult and attentuated.
Examples: http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=32963 http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=19242 http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=31718 http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=19242 http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=52610 http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=50888 http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=25330 http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=6406 etc etc etc The most common advice given is to use some cockmamie macro written by somebody, that didn't work last time I tried to install it. The other advice is a workaround of applying the "Text body" style to one's text. Yuck.
I've tweaked this issue, as it would be good to move this forward. Of course OOo does paragraph search with '$', but this doesn't currently meet user expectation as is evident from number of Issues... Cheers, Andrew.
*** Issue 19492 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Since Issue 19492 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue and Issue 20226 has been closed due to lack of activity I'll continue them both here even if the problem is not necessarily the same. In this thread there are complaints about regexps and I must say they're not really working in Writer. Try writing a document with first a few soft line breaks (<shift>-<return>) and then a few hard line breaks (<return>). Then try to replace the soft line breaks with hard ones. Using regexps you can search for \n and replace with \n. That replaces all soft line breaks with hard ones and a warning bell should ring here since you shouldn't actually make any difference since you're replacing with the same thing. Now, let's continue with replacing the hard line breaks with soft ones. If you search for \n (which you just replaced the soft line breaks with) you won't find any matches. So how do you find the hard line breaks - I'm sure that should be easy. But the next question is how do you replace them with soft line breaks. So that covers my problem with the current regexps. The workaround would be the possibility to copy nonprinting characters from a document (if you've turned them on from the View menu) and paste them into the search and replace tool. I'm quite sure you can do that in MS Word (and that's more or less the only thing I'm missing). If that feature would be implemented this whole problem would be solved as far as I can see. Why can't nonprinting characters be selected, copied and pasted in Writer? I'm sorry if I sound a bit upset. It's mostly because issues being closed for no reason (I don't think they should be closed until they're solved) and marked as duplicates even if they're more or less reporting different problems with the same features. I really do enjoy the whole OpenOffice suite and currently I wouldn't dream of using any other office programs, but there are a few features that would need some improvements and I'm afraid I don't have the time to do it myself.
move target to 3.x according http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Target_3x
still interested in this feature. the MS solution is a little bit ugly but would be nice to habe any solution.
To grep the issues easier via "requirements" I put the issues currently lying on my owner to the owner "requirements".
I agree. I use [sorry] Word for data manipulation. It can search and replace any chars or white space chars in a row. If I want to add "Fred says, "" to every first line in a paragraph, then I just replace ^p with ^pFred says," It is really a deal maker or breaker for me. I use this feature for all of my DB, Mail Merge, and Text file manipulations. Thanks BIG for listening.
Because this is an abandoned enhancement, I now copy-paste the text into an advanced text editor like UltraEdit or Editpad Pro to do the sort of search-replace functions that MS Word can do. Sad. And even if I want to use regex expressions, the regex engine in OO is so poor that I use EditPad Pro instead (which has a superb regex engine that actually works!)