Bug 107429 - Find and Replace use of Regular Expressions usage too hard, why not like Microsoft?
Summary: Find and Replace use of Regular Expressions usage too hard, why not like Micr...
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 102374
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: LibreOffice (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
5.1.4.2 release
Hardware: All All
: medium normal
Assignee: Not Assigned
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Reported: 2017-04-25 18:09 UTC by ikoll@gmx.de
Modified: 2017-04-26 19:59 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

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Description ikoll@gmx.de 2017-04-25 18:09:44 UTC
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???
Comment 1 V Stuart Foote 2017-04-25 19:17:34 UTC
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
Comment 2 V Stuart Foote 2017-04-25 19:20:13 UTC
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
Comment 3 V Stuart Foote 2017-04-26 19:59:20 UTC
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 ***