The procedure of find-replace is still very unsatisfactory. The explanations for regular expressions are insufficient and I find again and again misleading I have to switch to MS word on a different machine again and again I work often between spreadsheet lists and text programme (Writer - or then back to Word) What does not work: In Word I can replace several soft or hard returns to whatever i like, to tabs and vice versa. I cannot manage this in Writer. in Word I can change ^p to ^t or ^p^p to ^t or whatsoever. Writer does not take the corresponding commands another problem is that sometime writer wants different codes for search and replace. PLEASE GUYS make it simpler. Cant you reuse the same codes as in Word???
Sorry, the ICU Regular Expression support [1] is more than adequate and is far more functional the Microsoft's implementation. When enabled for use the ICU regular expression work in the Find and in the Replace fields. ^p empty paragraph is entered in regular expression as $^ ^t for tab is entered at \t This is a use/training issue--not a bug. Please RTM [2] =-ref-= [1] http://userguide.icu-project.org/strings/regexp#TOC-Regular-Expression-Metacharacters [2] https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/List_of_Regular_Expressions
And here is a bit older, but still mostly valid (LibreOffice has moved on from this) Wiki from the OOo era. https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/How_Tos/Regular_Expressions_in_Writer
Going to back out the NAB, and dupe to tdf#102374 There are instances when the replacement value will not accept the \t, notably when the Find pattern is ^$ -- meaning the ^p and ^t replacement in MS tools do it better than tools in LibreOffice. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 102374 ***