writer:remove paragraph breaks at end of line containing characters

[carnish]

I have a large plain text file imported to writer. The original file has paragraph breaks at the end of each line of text and then two paragraph breaks between paragraphs.

I can remove the end-of-line breaks using search/replace with ‘$’ but if I apply this to the entire document, I end up with one long line. I can work through piecemeal by applying the replacement to only the selected paragraph and though an acceptable solution it is not ideal.

So I think I want a real expression that matches paragraph break at end of line only if that line contains characters that are not paragraph breaks and to replace only the paragraph break.

[RGB-es]

I don’t think this is possible with the build-in RegExp engine: if you search for “something+paragraph break” there is no way to select just the paragraph break, not even with a “Look-behind assertion” or any other RegExp black magic. You may try with the AltSearch extension, which is more powerful. Or use a three step approach: first search for the empty paragraphs (with ^$) and replace them with some tag, then eliminate all paragraph ends (search for $ and replace with a space or nothing, you’ll end up with just one big paragraph in the document) and finally replace the tag you entered before with a paragraph break (search for your tag and replace with \n —yes, you need to write paragraph breaks differently on the search and on the replace boxes).

[Lupp]

(I don’t know the tool @gabix recommended. It may be great.)
For “dozens of versions” now the installable extension AltSearch works perfectly for me in all the related cases.

[gabix]

A solution: OOoFBTools. Menu OOoFBTools → Join broken lines of a paragraph (for automatic processing of the entire text) or Process ends of lines/paragraphs (for manual processing of a selection).