On 08/12/2008 22:02, Jerry Clancy wrote:
Invective aside, I have to agree with Elchanan. It can be
extraordinarily effective at times when editing to seach for and
replace instances of an end of paragraph marker (typically, a carraige
return/line feed pair) with or without surrounding characters. While
one responder indicated that there was no such thing, I beg to differ.
Surely Writer uses some internal representation of "paragraph end".
Not every word processor allows these seaches in spite of their
usefulness. Like Elchanan, I never found a way to do it either in
Writer in spite of spending quite a bit of time once trying to find
out how. To this day I still find myslef going back to good old
DOS-based XyWrite to do some of these things.
Your average user, I'd bet, hasn't a clue to what a "regex" is and,
furthermore, doesn't care. All they want to do in this case is have a
way of representing an "end of paragraph" (or line break, for that
matter) in a Writer search.
Jerry
<snip>
Firstly, paragraph marks and line-breaks (what you get with Shift-Enter)
*do not exist* as single characters in Writer documents. You can see
this by doing the following (this works on Windows; a slightly different
procedure *might* be needed on *nix or Mac):
1. Create a Writer document with a few paragraphs and line-breaks and
save it as, say "paragraphs.odt".
2. Rename the file to "paragraphs.zip".
3. Open this file with Winzip or equivalent.
4. Extract the file "content.xml" from the (Zip) archive into a *text*
editor.
You will see that the text of normal paragraphs is prefixed by an XML
"tag": <text:p text:style-name="Standard"> and terminated by a tag:
</text:p> whereas a "Shift-Enter" paragraph starts the same but is
terminated by the tag: <text:line-break/>.
Also, if you include characters like "<" and ">" they are replaced in
the XML file by their XML multi-character equivalents "<" and ">"
respectively, so even searching for those is not as straightforward as
it would seem at first sight.
Secondly, I quote from OOo's Help: "You can only search for regular
expressions within the same paragraph. That is, you cannot search for
one term in a paragraph and a different term in the next paragraph."
On the other hand, it would be really good if OOo could search for any
"artefact" it can construct - styles, fonts, etc. etc.
--
Harold Fuchs
London, England
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