Issue 44688 - Searching with regular expression ^$ does not find empty cells
Summary: Searching with regular expression ^$ does not find empty cells
Status: CLOSED DUPLICATE of issue 49380
Alias: None
Product: Calc
Classification: Application
Component: editing (show other issues)
Version: OOo 1.1.4
Hardware: All All
: P4 Trivial with 3 votes (vote)
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: requirements
QA Contact: issues@sc
URL:
Keywords:
: 90920 94594 (view as issue list)
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2005-03-10 09:49 UTC by tommyads
Modified: 2013-08-07 15:12 UTC (History)
4 users (show)

See Also:
Issue Type: ENHANCEMENT
Latest Confirmation in: ---
Developer Difficulty: ---

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Description tommyads 2005-03-10 09:49:44 UTC 
If you want to automatically enter a certain value into empty cells, this does
not seem to be possible with the replace dialog.
With Replace and using the regular expression ^$ as search string it does not
work (it does not find any cell). But it should find every empty cell, and so
enable the replacing with some other value. 
Thanks!
Comment 1 frank 2005-03-11 11:50:56 UTC 
Hi,

sorry to tell you but this is not a bug. If you press Find All, all empty cells
will be found resulting in a performance Issue as around 3 Million cells can be
selected.

So I re-flaged it as enhancement and assign it to the requirements team.

Frank
Comment 2 frank 2005-03-11 13:35:30 UTC 
Hi,

sorry for any confusion caused. If this would work currently you may experience
performance problems. For know it doesn't work. Therefore enhancement and
re-assigned for decisiion about it.

Frank
Comment 3 frank 2005-03-11 14:01:38 UTC 
Hi Thomas,

please use the Issue itself for comments. So nothing essential about the
decission on how and than it will be integrated get lost.

---
But why not - in such cases - add a count-value (which can be modified by the
user, 0 meaning search for all possible cells) and ask after every e.g. 1000
found cells if further searching is wanted?
---

Frank
Comment 4 drking 2007-10-26 11:42:14 UTC 
Three further points:

1. The performance issue is a valid one, and not just for regex / Find & 
Replace. It is possible to copy some text, select the entire spreadsheet (click 
top left hand corner of the sheet) and then do paste (^v). The thing hangs ... 
(OOo2.3 XP). Of course that is a stupid thing to do. To test I just did it ;)

2. The message from Find & Replace "Search string not found" is very 
misleading - this is presumably being caught by the program as a special case, 
so a better message might be easy to implement.

3. There seems no reason to stop the user finding blank cells *within a 
selection*, and this is something that a user might well want to do. At least 
the user should get a decent message.
Comment 5 drking 2007-11-04 10:21:14 UTC 
Please note that I've raised issue 83289 about ^$ not finding empty table cells 
in Writer. I've raised it as a new issue, because the behaviour seems to be by 
design in Calc.
Comment 6 ooo 2008-09-10 15:38:46 UTC 
*** Issue 90920 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Comment 7 Raphael Bircher 2009-06-21 17:14:50 UTC 
*** Issue 94594 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Comment 8 kpalagin 2010-03-01 11:19:40 UTC 
seems to be dup of 49380.

*** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 49380 ***
Comment 9 kpalagin 2010-03-01 11:20:18 UTC 
Closing.
Please transfer your votes to 49380.