Replace two line breaks

[January]

I am trying to kick the microsoft habit and one of the things I use Word for is removing unnecessary line breaks (paragraph marks). In Word, I start by protecting necessary line breaks by replacing two line breaks with two tab characters. Then I replace unnecessary line breaks with spaces. Then I replace two spaces with one. Then I replace two tab characters with one line break. And like magic the unnecessary line breaks are gone.

(In Word ^p is a line break and ^t is a tab. )

In LO when I search $ with Regular Expressions checked it searches for line breaks, but it won’t let me search for two line breaks.

I would love some help troubleshooting this so I can get away from the microsoft monster.

[Grantler]

@January
Have you ever tested AltSearch.oxt v. 1.4.2?
It can search a sequence of empty paragraphs and replace them with one.


Note:
It is an outdated extension and sometimes works in an uncomplete way. But it is worth a try.

[ajlittoz]

Built-in Edit>Find & Replace is limited to one paragraph contents. Therefore you can’t specify a search target spanning several paragraphs.

In fact, what you want is not to fix two paragraph marks in a row, but to eliminate empty paragraphs, i.e. void paragraphs.

For that:

• enter ^$ in Find box. This pattern means: from paragraph start ^ to paragraph end $ with nothing in between.
• leave Replace empty.
• tick Regular expressions

Press Find Next to check the pattern is correct. Then press Replace All if you’re confident or Replace repetitively to process each occurrence one by one.

PS: when asking here, always mention OS name, exact LO version (not “latest”) and save format.

[fpy]

How to use find and replace to change double paragraph breaks to single

There are two solutions to your problem. #Manual method Enable display of internal technical code with View>Formatting Marks. After that, you’ll see on your screen the empty paragraphs corresponding to the double (or more) paragraph breaks. Use your mouse or arrow keys to go there and press either Del or Backspace for forward or backward erasure. #Automatic method Open the Edit>Find & Replace dialog. In the Find box, enter ^$ which means “empty paragraph”. Leave Replace empty. Very important:…

Using Regular Expressions in Text Searches