Search and Replace non-printing characters

I’m new to LibreOffice Writer and have a couple of bones to pick but have found work-arounds for most of my issues. However, the “Find and Replace” function in LibreOffice Writer has me stymied.

Open “Find & Replace” in Windows MS-Word, click “More” and you see a list of non-printing formatting characters, e.g. Paragraph Marks, Manual Line Breaks, etc., that you can use Search & Replace to modify your document. For instance, replace two paragraph marks (2 “Return” key entries) with one paragraph mark (1 “Return” key) and a tab character. Also, please don’t say to do it manually, I’ve 300 pages of text to format.

Does LibreOffice Writer have ANYTHING similar? Don’t point me at the Regular Expressions…they don’t work e.g. \n\c in the “C” programming language is a new line\carriage return character combination and \t is a tab character. In Libre Office Writer, ]n is a hard page break. I know, I tried to get it to work. Please help.

Many Thanks.

1 Like

@Beelzebub – Do you have solved the problem?

I’m trying to format a document without tab indents after paragraphs. Format requirements are no indents and a common space between paragraphs. I’ve been trying to figure this out for two hours. Tried going to Find and Replace non print characters formatting. I see the tab arrows but no way to remove them.

Try this extension : http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center/alternative-dialog-find-replace-for-writer

Sounds like this extension is very useful!

Thank you! As an LO newbie this solved my first stumbling block.

Excuse me. I misspoke. It did work. Thank you.

Did NOT work for me. I added the find/replace extension. Confirmed in tools/extension manager. Tried ^p , /p, \p, “^p”, "/p"and more. tried variations of the $ to find paragraph mark. Nothing seems to find the paragraph mark.

Did Work. sort of. I found the alternative find and replace with the binoculars icon. The task was just to put paragraphs in alphabetic order based on the first letter(s) of that paragraph which would be somebody’s name. I have done this before I think with Word. Soooo…
With this extension I could find the paragraph symbol and replace it with the line return, BUT after the symbol was found, I could not elect to not replace it and find the next, any ideas?

I use LO for most things now, except for this problem: cleaning up “dirty” documents. I still kept a copy of “MS Word 95” just because I was used to it, and I tried many times doing same in LO but gave up - it never worked.

It took me the last 3 hours but I finally figured it out. Time to chuck Word (and MS Windows) at last! :slight_smile:

This is how I used to do it before, using MS Word:

  1. search for ^p^p and replace with XX
  2. search for ^p and replace with _ (a single space)
  3. search for XX and replace with ^p
  4. search for _ _ (double space, no spaces!) and replace with _ (single space)
  5. run it multiple times until there are no more extra spaces in the document

This is how I now do it, with Libre Office

  1. download and install extension called “Alternative Searching” :frowning:
  2. search for ^$ and replace with XX_ (a space after the XX)
  3. search for $ and replace with a _ (space)
  4. open the Alternative Searching extension and…
  5. search for XX_ and replace with /p
  6. search for _ _ (double space, no spaces!) and replace with _ (single space)
  7. run it multiple times until there are no more extra spaces in the document

Hope it works for you.

Cheers,
skris88