New-line search & replace in OpenOffice.org Writer

Linux User & Developer has an article by Sukrit Dhandania on optimising (UK spelling ) OpenOffice.org. An anonymous user left a comment claiming that he had opened 10 tickets regarding basic new line search-and-replace.

<quote>
10 times my ticket was closed in 10 years telling me its not important feature that needs attention.
</quote>

I remembered that OpenOffice.org Writer has a regular expression option in the search dialog:

Now that looked promising.

To help you see this procedure in action, I created the Google document below from a GMail message:

Since GMail put in the new line character between lines, and two new-line characters between paragraphs, this would be a mess to edit.

First thing to do is look for the double occurrences of the line feed (or new line, or spaces, if you prefer) that separate paragraphs, then change those to a sequence of characters that couldn’t possibly appear in the text. For this particular document, I chose ‘NewParagraphHolder’:

The regular expression for a line feed is \n. I did this first instead of the single line breaks between lines within a paragraph. I´ll explain this after the next step. In the meantime, here´s what the document will look like:

Next, search for the single occurrence of the line feed, and replace with a space:

If I had done this step before the search-and-replace on the double line feed, the entire document would run into one large paragraph. Try this yourself if you´re not convinced. Incidentally, that´s a space in the ¨Replace with¨ box. Here´s a screen shot of the document after that search-and-replace:

Now we´ve let OpenOffice.org Writer´s word wrap take care of putting in line feeds. Finally, I replace the end-of-paragraph character with the real end-of-paragraph, a line feed:

And my document´s happy:

Incidentally, you may notice that my single \n still created two line feeds between paragraphs. That´s because of my default style sheet, which automagically inserts an extra line after a paragraph.