Using tilde in find window to escape special meaning is not working

[rallan]

I am running
Version: 7.6.6.3 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: d97b2716a9a4a2ce1391dee1765565ea469b0ae7
CPU threads: 22; OS: Windows 10.0 Build 22631; UI render: Skia/Raster; VCL: win
Locale: en-CA (en_CA); UI: en-US
Calc: CL threaded

In LibreCalc, I am trying to replace all asterisks with a space. I tried to find all asterisks using the tilde (ie, “~*”) but it says nothing found, though I can see cells with an asterisk amidst the text string. Is there another way to accomplish this? Thank you

[robleyd]

Turn off regular expressions in the search and simply search for * and replace with a space.

If you want to use regular expressions, search for \* and replace with a space.

[erAck]

And if you wanted to escape a * wildcard then you’d need to enable Wildcards first, but the escape character in the Find&Replace dialog is not ~ tilde but \ backslash (different to formula expressions, but same as in Writer), so \*

MS in its great wisdom uses \ in Word and ~ in Excel, we tried to mimic that and use \ in Writer Find&Replace and ~ in Calc Find&Replace but that confused the hell out of people so now it’s \ for both.

[mikekaganski]

Hmm, it would seem natural to me, if we simply followed the chosen syntax: the “Wildcards” checkbox would follow the wildcard syntax. Then it would be the best of all worlds…?

[erAck]

But that’s what we do… Just that there is no “the wildcard syntax” because as said, MS-Word does not use ~ tilde escape but \ backslash escape (in fact it doesn’t use these simple wildcards either but some poor man’s version of regex that aren’t …), and we use \ backslash escape in both Writer and Calc in the Find&Replace dialog. Though we could say that these are MS-Excel wildcards (which they are) and thus use ~ tilde escape instead, but that could also be just confusing. Does Excel even use these wildcards in its Find&Replace dialog?
In any case, documentation / online help are lacking these details.

[mikekaganski]

We don’t have wildcards support in Writer’s F&R:

So I believe, that it’s OK to use the syntax that we implement in Calc. (@erAck: I like the occasion to discuss it with you, sorry for hijacking the thread )

[erAck]

Oh indeed, my memory served me bad… back those years I prepared everything around the dialog and search so that it could be used by Writer as well, but that was never implemented… my bad, sorry. I may have even confused the \ vs ~ thing then… seems it was \ from the beginning.