Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 125196
SOFT HYPHEN (optional hyphen) cannot be found by regular expression and Unicode code point
Last modified: 2014-07-18 20:13:35 UTC
Enable "Field shading" in menu View, so that the SOFT HYPHEN will become visible. Open special character dialog and insert the whole row ¡¢£¤¥¦§¨©ª«¬ ®¯°. It contains the character SOFT HYPHEN between ¬ and ® (not here but in your document). Open Find&Replace dialog, click on "More Options" and enable "Regular Expression". Search for either of these \u00ad \x{00ad} \xad \0255 It should find the SOFT HYPHEN but does not. Try the same with \u00ae \x{00ae} \xae \0256 It will find the character ® without problems. Thus the regex engine itself works, but not for SOFT HYPHEN.
Tested OpenOffice 4.1.1 411m2(Build:9771) on Fedora Linux I see the same problem. None of these match it either: . (any character) \W (any non-word character) \p{Cf} (Unicode property/category Other, Control) It does work to set Options / Regular expressions: OFF and enter the character directly (by code AD) in the "Search for" box.