Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 28913
Need list of regular expressions in UI to ease "Find and Replace"
Last modified: 2013-02-07 22:40:31 UTC
We need regular expressions to find non-breaking spaces, long dashes and so on. This can be realized in regular expressions or in basic search expressions, but this must be done.
Nothing to do with regular expressions. These are regular characters that can be inserted into the serach dialog * using copy and pase * using the "Insert Special Character" dialog (<ctrl><shift>s or rightclick-menu) * select character befor launching the dialog. (if you want to use regular expression you can use the character code as well) closing worksforme. If you "insist" on having regular expressions for this please reopen this issue and please name what these regular expressions should look like.
closing for now. reopen if you're not satisfied with the information given (but please give requested details in this case)
How a usual user (not me) can search for non-breaking space? Copy and paste character? Wich? And he must know there is that character is placed in document before hi find and copies it to search dialog. Better to place [:non-break:] into search field then do that hard job. Searching must be simple as it can.
> Copy and paste character? Wich? ? The user should know what he is searching for (and why). If he doesn't know that how can he look up the regular expression for that characters? > And he must know there is that character is placed in document before hi find > and copies it to search dialog. He can simply insert it into the document himself. > Better to place [:non-break:] into search field then do that hard job. > Searching must be simple as it can. How does the user know that he has to enter [:non-break:] (or any other expression) into the search field? I think looking up the regular expression is much more complicated that copy'n'pasting the actual character (many users don't even know what a regular expression is). I think a regular expression search is much more complicated than a regular search. But I'm reopening this issue. A quick search at google reveiled that MS Office uses "^s" as regex. for non-breaking space and "^=" for en-dash ("^+" for em-dash)
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MRU->SBA: please evaluate.
SBA: Having a look at the "Find and Replace" UI of MS Word gives a hint how to ease the search for things like "odd characters", punctuation marks and the like. I think this may be a good inspiration how to ease this in OO too. gyaroslav said above <QUOTE> "Better to place [:non-break:] into search field then do that hard job. Searching must be simple as it can." <UNQUOTE> In my opinion to enhance the "Regular Expression amount" is less than half the way to ease the Find and Replace function for average users. Hardly anyone wants to learn "How-To-Code-What-I-Want". The best solution is always "easily finding and clicking on what I was looking for" Reassigned to Bettina.
but now: reassigned to bh...
*** Issue 32206 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Not sure if anyone is still following this, but what is a non-breaking space? Thanks, Peter
non-breaking space is what you get with <ctrl>+<space> No word-wrap will occur at this space. regular space: with non-breaking space between "2" and "km" bla bla bla 2 bla bla bla km bla bla 2 km bla bla
That's a neat feature. :) Kind of like the keep with next paragraph feature, but for text. Thanks.
*** Issue 66285 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
*** Issue 72187 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Not exactly sure if this issue has finally evolved into "Please add a list of common control characters with their regexes). If it did then then we should mark 63074 as duplicate of this one. Please comment.
As suggested by SBA, I am changing the summary to better reflect the idea that Search and Replace dialog needs to have list of common regexes. Upping priority, changing component to UI as this is not just for wordprocessor.
To grep the issues easier via "requirements" I put the issues currently lying on my owner to the owner "requirements".