asked 2012-04-24 04:57:00 +0200
This post is a wiki. Anyone with karma >750 is welcome to improve it.
Dear IT gurus,
I need to remove some data from some spreadsheets. I would like to know if there is an easy way to do it.
What I need to do is this:
I have these types of entries:
< abc > < xyz >
My question is this: Is there a simple way to extract all such entries without having to do it for each entry,i.e., is there a way I can remove all the < > brackets and data between them in one go?
If you know how to do this I would be grateful if you would let me know what I need to do.
Best wishes,
Techno Peasant
You don't need a macro to do this - regular expressions should be able to sort you out.
Press Ctrl-H to bring up the full Find and Replace dialogue box.
Click the More Options button if you see it at the bottom right.
Check the 'Regular expressions' checkbox
Now, in the 'Search for' combo-box at the top, enter:
<.*>
Leave the 'Replace with' combo-box blank.
Now when you click 'Replace', this should go through your spreadsheet finding any instance of a left angle-bracket (<) followed by any number of any characters (.*) followed by a right angle-bracket (>) and replace it with nothing, i.e., remove it.
@doubi, If LO uses greedy-matching, wouldn't that mean that your REGEXP would change something like "<a>foo</a> stuff to keep <b>bar</b>" to the empty string "" instead of the intended " stuff to keep "?
(If LO uses non-greedy matching, then we'd get "foo stuff to keep bar")
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Asked: 2012-04-24 04:57:00 +0200
Seen: 105 times
Last updated: Apr 24 '12
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Techno Peasant -- Still looking for help here?
qubit ( 2013-03-13 05:11:51 +0200 )edit