In WRITER with version 5.1.4.2 (for ubuntu) the “regular expressions” were changed. Unfortunately to the worst. They had been more useful in the former version 5.0. Especially \l and \p do not work in “Edit” - “Find&Replace”, which was very useful for me in the past.
Here is the current situation (only to show that improvement is urgently neded):
\a, \b, \e, \f, \k, \p, \r, \u, \x, \z do not find anything.
\d finds numbers.
\h and \s find blank space.
\n finds manual line break (as it did before).
\t finds tabulators.
\w find the next letter or number.
\c, \g, \i, \j, \l, \m, \o, \q, \y find the repective next letter without the .
In addition, the Extension “Alternative Searching” (icon: green binoculars) is still present in version 5.1 as an icon, but does not respond. That means, it cannot be activated.
The issue presented here on Nov 5, '16 is very correct. I also suffer under the new conditions. E.g. the regular expression “shift enter” is available only in the search field, but not in the replace field.
Are there any means to circumvent this difficulty ? Who can help ?
You’re confused. The switches \p and \l are from Word, they aren’t defined in Writer regular expressions. The Alternative Search and Replace works for me in version 5.2.2.2. You probably have a corrupted user profile, best thing is to refresh it.
Last of all, when you sign up here, it’s best to first review the Help for this site. There you can read that bug reports should be posted at the bug tracker, not here, and by the way, the same holds for enhancement requests.
EDIT to reply to answer: both \p and \m work, \n is for line breaks. I’m on Windows 10, it’s possible that the extension doesn’t work in Linux, I can’t verify that.
Thank you, Floris V, for your rapid reply. I have the latest Libreoffice version in the current Ubuntu longterm version. So if your version 5.2 will work in future in Ubuntu I will be happy and I am waiting. Could you please be so kind and look if the Alternative Search&Replace Icon is able to find the following useful regular expressions: (1) \p (line break) and (2) \m (manual page break). They were very useful. They were components of the Regular Expression Table of this extension in WRITER until version 5.0, but then disappeared in Find&Replace. (3) \r (carriage return) also worked and was useful, but was not in the table. Thank you in advance. I don’t know if this is a bug or a change in the procedures.
Please don’t ask questions or post answers as wiki when there’s no really good reason for it. It makes it impossible for you to get the karma that you need to accept answers or vote them up, as a sign that they’re useful. and not just to compliment the writer of that answer.
And this ain’t an answer !