"Harold Fuchs" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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,
Firstly, let me wholeheartedly concur with your last sentence and, secondly,
thank you for your response, as it pretty much answered the questions I had
raised for myself after looking at the raw Writer text. When I did so the
document internally looked very much like a compressed text which, it turns
out it is. After your post I did unzip it and looked at it and saw the tags.
I guess, then, in light of your response, what I would like to see is the
ability of the user to incorporate the paragraph symbol (Plicrow) in a
search, perhaps as a special search character. Any replace function would of
necessity have to interchange the Pilcrow with the internal XML
representation. Or perhaps have an alternate XML view and search the XML
version, a cleaner approach but with obvious issues for those unfamiliar
with it (it's somewhat like editing raw RTF text, a nightmare, though much
easieer).
I honestly don't understand the Help paragraph you reference. It seems to
imply that I cannot search across an entire document.
Jerry
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