How to find alphabets within a column?

I have a column consisting some coordinates. Is there any way to find and match whether any entries have alphabets within them?

[[[150.5208608, -34.83470085], [151.3430992, -34.11870085], [151.343020992, -33.540996],[150.520608, -33.5781996]]]


[[[76.84252, 28.397657], [77.347652, 28.397657], [77.347652, 28.879322], [76.84252, 28.879322]]]


[[[-88.473228, 30.144425], [-84.888247, 30.144425], [-84.888247, 35.008029], [-88.473228, 35.008029]]]


Sample Gibberish Text here in a cell


[[[76.84252, 28.397657], [77.347652, 28.397657], [77.347652, 28.879322], [76.84252, 28.879322]]]

So these are a few coordinates from the column. Is there any way to find out whether this column of coordinates contain any unwanted text. Manually checking each column would be tedious as I have thousands of entries. Is there any way to handle this in LibreCalc? Thank You,

[Edit Opaque] Shortened title of the question and added original title into details

I need to repeat my question in my comment to the answer of this question. It is easy to find a an [:alpha:] but what should happen? Do you want Conditional formatting to highlight cells having a character( e.g a warning red backgroud, so you manual can fix that) , do you want to perform a Find & Replace (Deletion of the character found) or do you want an additional check column indicating that a coordinate cell in the same row has Sample Gibberish Text here in a cell or any other action?

Hey thanks for quick reply. I just need to find the cells of the column which contain any text

But finding only should be clear from my answer to this question . Repeat the same procedure with

Find .+[:alpha:].+ until step

  • Click Find All (in other words: don’t click Replace All button)

(though I don’t understand how that supports you editing strategy, I personally would at least perform a conditional formatting attracting my attention to faulty data cells)

@anon73440385 I just need to know whether any cell contains any gibberish. Actually my code messed up in some places and mixed those coordinates with text. So I need to manually replace that gibberish with corresponding coordinates. Though there aren’t too many cells containing text, but I still need to be sure there aren’t any because even 1 wrong cell may hamper my algorithm’s output. I have cleaned all the cells according to your solution above. Thanks a lot

For the records (according to OP’s last comment)

  • Select the column containing your coordinates
  • Edit -> Find & Replace
    Find: .+[:alpha:].+
    Replace: leave empty
    Other Options 1: [x] Current selection only
    Other Options 1: [x] Regular expressions
  • Click button Find All

Don’t click button Replace All. This might delete the cells containing alpha characters. For data protection reasons it is recommended to perform the procedure on a copy of the original data first.

Tested using LibreOffice:

Version: 6.4.3.2; Build ID: 747b5d0ebf89f41c860ec2a39efd7cb15b54f2d8
CPU threads: 8; OS: Linux 4.12; UI render: default; VCL: kf5; 
Locale: en-US (en_US.UTF-8); UI-Language: en-US; Calc: threaded

Hope that helps.

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