Bug 161074 - Ability to search and replace Paragraph, Tab, and other text control characters
Summary: Ability to search and replace Paragraph, Tab, and other text control characters
Status: RESOLVED NOTABUG
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Writer (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
24.2.2.2 release
Hardware: All All
: medium enhancement
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2024-05-14 14:33 UTC by Smgolden
Modified: 2024-06-13 12:07 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

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Description Smgolden 2024-05-14 14:33:24 UTC
Description:
Coming from using MS Word since version 4 (1990), probably the single greatest feature missing from LibreOffice Writer is the ability to search and replace Paragraph marks, New line marks, Tabs, and so on.  For example, if I import (copy/paste) some text into Writer and it has two paragraph breaks between paragraphs, but I only want one, in Word, I would find-replace ^p^p^p with ^p^p.  

There seems to be no feature to do something like that in Write.  If I wanted to change line breaks to paragraph marks in Word, I could find-replace ^l with ^p.  

I've tried many suggestions, but none of them seem to be able to do it.  I even installed 3rd party "Alt. Find & Replace" and it can't do it reliably either.

This was a feature I would use nearly every day in Word.  Now, I have to use a manual delete/edit process in Writer.

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Create the situation by making four paragraphs in a Writer document with two "blank lines" between each.
2.Invoke the Edit > Find and Replace
3.Try to find the end of each paragraph and the two blank lines in a search.  There seems to be no control information that can be placed into the Find and Replace fields to find them.


Actual Results:
LibreOffice Find and Replace cannot find the end of a paragraph, whether it is a paragraph with text, or a blank line paragraph.

Expected Results:
I would like to be able to find the end of a paragraph in Writer search.  For example, if there is a paragraph with two blank lines following it in MS Word, I would search ^p^p^p.
If I would like to remove one of the blank lines, in MS Word, I would find ^p^p^p and replace with ^p^p.  This would remove one of the blank lines.

The first ^p finds the end of the paragraph and the subsequent ^p's identify the blank-line paragraphs.

The ability to search other text control characters is desired as well.


Reproducible: Always


User Profile Reset: Yes

Additional Info:
Version: 24.2.2.2 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: 420(Build:2)
CPU threads: 16; OS: Linux 6.5; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3
Locale: en-US (en_US.UTF-8); UI: en-US
Ubuntu package version: 4:24.2.2~rc2-0ubuntu0.22.04.1~lo1
Calc: threaded

However, the behavior is true in Windows OS as well.
Comment 2 Stéphane Guillou (stragu) 2024-06-13 12:07:23 UTC
As m_a_riosv said, and also: https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/shared/01/02100001.html

An example of other users resolving a similar issue: https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/how-do-i-remove-blank-lines-between-paragraphs-in-libre-office-writer/32015

If you have doubts on how to use the feature, please feel free to ask on ask.libreoffice.org for more guidance.