Description: Matching start-of-line using a lone ^ does not work, or not correctly. It seems impossible to prepend anything to a group of lines, for example, to make them into a block comment by prepending "' " in Basic code. Maybe now that someone who knows how Find & Replace works is here, this can be looked at. The problem is that ^ by itself does not match unless the line contains something after the start-of-line position (i.e. it is not completely empty). 1. Open the ReplaceBug.ods demo and navigate to the Basic code as described in the original comment. 2. Select lines 3-5, i.e., the empty sub declaration ("Sub Main", the empty line, and "End Sub") 3. Control-H. Check "Regular expressions" Set Find: to the single character ^ (should match starts of lines) Set Replace: to the character ' (the Basic comment-starter char) Click Replace All RESULTS: The apostrophie is prepended to only the non-empty lines. EXPECTED RESULTS: Should be prepended to every line. Actual Results: Expected Results: Reproducible: Always User Profile Reset: No Additional Info:
Created attachment 160565 [details] Demo script - see Steps To Reproduce
In master (7.0 alpha), the behavior changed, but is still not correct. Now ^ seems to match only completely-empty lines; nothing is inserted in lines which contain text.
Confirmed in Version: 7.0.0.0.alpha0+ (x64) Build ID: dbd74393fd0b4d11655e2c4d2676ec1bfebe8923 CPU threads: 6; OS: Windows 10.0 Build 17134; UI render: Skia/Vulkan; VCL: win; Locale: de-DE (de_DE); UI-Language: en-US Calc: CL
I think the regression was introduced by https://bz.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=118887, but I think this behaviour is not correct. Consider the String "5a". If I search using the regex "[0-9]*", I should get 3 matches: - 0 to 1, which is 5 - 1 to 1 and 2 to 2, which is empty However, if I search using "[0-9]+", I get the expected match, so imho we should allow zero length matches at the beginning of a paragraph.
> Consider the String "5a". If I search using the regex "[0-9]*", I should get 3 > matches: > - 0 to 1, which is 5 > - 1 to 1 and 2 to 2, which is empty Could you clarify what you meant by "1 to 1" and "2 to 2"? The regex [0-9]* should always match anything (or nothing) because it means "zero or more digits". It will match as many digits as it can while still allowing subsequent regex terms to match (in this example, there are no other terms). At each step during matching, the current regex term must succeed at the current position of the input; if it does, then the next regex term is tried etc. until all terms match. If a regex term fails, then the engine has to BACKTRACK and try a different choice in a previous regex term, if any (if there is no previous term or all choices have been tried, then the overall match fails). In this case, since the regex can succeed matching zero characters, it will (or should) match at any position of any input string, *even an empty input string*.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 135538 ***