On 28/01/2008 15:18, Brian Blandford wrote:
Lindsay Graham wrote:
After quite a bit of searching through the list archives and Help
files and Tutorials, I have finally found out how to find/replace the
special symbols paragraph mark, soft return and tab. But why was it
so hard to find this in OpenOffice?
So what is the secret, please, Lindsay? I haven't cracked it yet, and
like you have spent frustrating times trying to find out. In the end I
resorted to going laboriously through a document exchanging the
special symbols manually.
Brian B.
I hate to say it, but MS Word has a list of symbols under Special in
the Find/Replace dialog box that is very easy to understand and to
use. I've not yet been able to find anything similar in OO. When I
first looked at Regular Expressions in the OO Help files, it was
pretty much gobbledy-gook to me. Even now that I understand it a bit
more, I cannot see where it says how to find/replace special symbols
such as hard space or a hard hyphen.
Is it possible for the Help Files in this area of OO to be made more
easily understandable by new users? Especially, of course, those
users of MS Word who are looking to change to OO -- I presume those
are the people that we really want to attract to OO.
Lindsay Graham
Canberra, Australia
-----------------------------
Please reply only to the list/newsgroup, so that all may benefit
The "secret" is something called a Regular Expression (RE). REs specify
a way of defining a "pattern" of text, including special symbols that
can be used as a search criterion within a text string or document. Text
editing software has been using these for 20+ years. OpenOffice uses
them. The standard Windows way of saying "any file whose name begins
with x and has a .exe extension: "x*.exe" is a simplified and non
standard RE.
In the Find & Replace dialogue, click on More Options and then tick
Regular Expressions; they are *not* turned on by default. To find a tab,
use "\t" (that's backslash lower-case-t without the quotes). To find a
paragraph break use "$"; an empty paragraph is "^$" (both without the
quotes). The Help under Regular Expressions gives a list of things you
can do/say using them. For example, to find any number between 9000 and
9999 you could say "9[0-9]{3}" (without the quotes). The Help will
explain how that works.
Study of REs will be repaid very quickly if you plan to do a lot of text
editing.
--
Harold Fuchs
London, England
Please reply *only* to [email protected]
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