Regular Expressions and the Find Toolbar

[StephenM1]

Good Morning

I just want to be sure that I am not missing anything about using regular expressions when searching for text.

Am I correct in believing that it is not possible to enter regular expressions directly into the “Find Text” field of the Find toolbar? That is, I need to go into the “Find and Replace” popup select the “Regular Expressions” option and then type my regexp there.

If the above is the case then I thought I would be able to add the “Regular Expressions” option to the Find toolbar. However, I cannot find any obviously named commands in the Customise Toolbar window. Indeed, I cannot even see how the “Match Case” button makes its way onto the toolbar as there is nothing named similarly under any of the commands! I think I am missing something about how customisation of toolbars works.

I am using
Version: 7.0.4.2
Build ID: dcf040e67528d9187c66b2379df5ea4407429775
CPU threads: 4; OS: Linux 5.4; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3
Locale: en-AU (en_AU.UTF-8); UI: en-US
Calc: threaded

Any thought/suggestions would be appreciated.

regards
Stephen Meatheringham
Canberra, Australia

[anon73440385]

Hello,

you are right - it is not possible to enter regular expressions into the Find field at the bottom of the LibreOffice application (CTRL+F). And this toolbar cannot be customized with a function regular expressions as there is no such Command (as available functional elements are called in LibreOffice customize dialog). The only way to use Find with regular expressions is via Edit -> Find and Replace... (CTRL+H).

[PKG]

[anon87010807]

The Find toolbar is a lightweight utility for easy search commands. It was added to Libre, I think, at some point, it was certainly not available in older versions of Apache OpenOffice or OpenOffice.org. The toolbar was probably kept small on purpose, to prevent clogging. And once you start adding power to it, where is the end? Next time people want to add searching for formatting properties, styles, and all those goodies that are already in the original Find & Replace dialog box, which also has a button to get Help when you forgot what regular expression to use for a paragraph start.