How do I remove some line/paragraph breaks from text using Find/Replace

[DerAlteFritz]

I have a Contents page from a book however the lines are broken up by paragraph breaks. How do I remove some of these non printable characters so that each entry fits onto one line.

I was thinking of using Find/Replace or the Find/Replace Extention to find:

[:alpha:]$ the alphabetic characters with a paragraph break after them

and then to remove JUST the paragraph break.
Is this possible?
Or is there an alternative?

example:
2 ПРИКАЗ НАРОДНОГО КОМИССАРИАТА ПО ВОЕННЫМ ДЕЛАМ ОБ ОРГШТАТНЫХ [$]

ИЗМЕНЕНИЯХ УПРАВЛЕНИЙ ВОЕННОГО ВЕДОМСТВА 6

turned into
2. ПРИКАЗ НАРОДНОГО КОМИССАРИАТА ПО ВОЕННЫМ ДЕЛАМ ОБ ОРГШТАТНЫХ ИЗМЕНЕНИЯХ УПРАВЛЕНИЙ ВОЕННОГО ВЕДОМСТВА 6

Thanks

[DerAlteFritz]

The main issue seems to be not overwriting text that you have found when dealing with paragraph breaks (the little blue P symbol at the end of a line)

An expression such as <[1-9][0-9]> should find a digital number. This works!
<[1-9][0-9]> $ should find a digital number with a paragraph break following it. This works.
(<[1-9][0-9]*>)\1 $ grouping the digital number with (…)\1 should enable it to be protected in the replace box but this does expression does not work.

So using the working expression
Find: <[1-9][0-9]*> $
Replace: 0$@@@@
should give me the original string (protected) but add @@@@ at the end. This also does not work.

Tried this alternative:
[:digit:] $ finds a digit followed by a space and a paragraph break. This works and finds all the lines with numbers at the end.

Step 1:
Find: [:digit:]$ finds a digit with a paragraph break after it
Replace: $0@@@@ keeps all the text but adds @@@@ string after the digits
Result: 45@@@@[paragraph break]

Step 2:
Find: $ finds all paragraph breaks
Replace: one space
Result: Remove all paragraph breaks giving one long text

Step 3:
Find: @@@@
Replace \n
Result: 45[line break] restores breaks at any point in the text with string @@@@ at the end

So mission accomplished but slightly disappointing that the ()\1 grouping does not seem to work in the Find box.

[dajare]

It doesn’t work because regex searches do not work across paragraph breaks with LibO’s regex engine. Quite frustrating.

[DerAlteFritz]

I am glad that you say that because I thought it was just me. It does not seem to work with the Alternative Find and Replace for Writer Extention either which is a bore.
However the little work around I posted above does work so I got this job done in a number of stages when in reality it should be able to do this sort of thing in one go.

[dajare]

@DerAlteFritz - Yeah, it’s a drag. This has come up before, and see also the bugs listed against regex and paragraphs. This has been a pain for a long time, unfortunately. There was a change in regex engines at some point (I believe – I’m sure I read about that somewhere), but it didn’t help with this.

[Lupp]

You may adapt the code I posted in this recent thread to your needs.

Edit 1:
If the task can be done interactively using a specialised Sub it should be simple:
-1- Find All next to paragraph breaks you want to delete based on one of the respective regular expressions like [:alpha:]$ in the given case.
-2- With the selection made this way run the following Sub:

Sub removeParagraphBreaksFound()
theText  = ThisComponent.Text
theSel   = ThisComponent.CurrentSelection
For j = 0 To theSel.Count - 1
    oneRange    = theSel(j)
    theCursor   = theText.CreateTextCursorByRange(oneRange.End)
    theCursor.GoRight(1, True)
    theCursor.String = ""
Next j
End Sub  

-3- Repeat -1- and -2- with different regular expressions if needed.

Check the suggestion thoroughly. There were many requests of the kind, but not this answer yet (or a similar one). Thus I doubt if it can be that simple.

I did not explore what complications may occur if formated text portions were split. Errors expected!

[DerAlteFritz]

Excellent I will have a look at this

[gabix]

Try OOoFBTools.

[DerAlteFritz]

Sorry is not relevant since I am not working with an e-book but thank you for the suggestion all the same